Office 2007 Fails OOXML Test With 122,000 Errors

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Groklaw is reporting that some people have decided to compare the OOXML schema to actual Microsoft Office 2007 documents. It won't surprise you to know that Office 2007 failed miserably. If you go by the strict OOXML schema, you get a 17 MiB file containing approximately 122,000 errors, and 'somewhat less' with the transitional OOXML schema. Most of the problems reportedly relate to the serialization/deserialization code. How many other fast-tracked ISO standards have no conforming implementations?"

Comments

I wish I had mod points right now...

[Anonymous Coward]

This would be a great thread to put some more negative karma in twitter's sock puppets.

Re:I wish I had mod points right now...

[CmdrGravy]

I agree, I find all this whining extremely irritating. If they have something to say about the actual post they should say it or otherwise shut up. Jackasses.

What's the Problem?

[eldavojohn]

If you can change a vote of "no with comments" to "yes" I don't see why you couldn't change "fails with 122,000 errors" to "passes." I mean, when your standard passes through sheer lobbying and politics with little technical analysis, it's going to take a lot to surprise me with how epically it fails.

Re:What's the Problem?

[Finallyjoined!!!]

Repost.
OOXML: "The best Standard money can buy"

Re:What's the Problem?

[bhtooefr]

Diebold voting machines run Windows CE.

Re:What's the Problem?

[eldavojohn]

All I have to say is that it's a good thing Microsoft isn't running the 2008 Presidential Election! Diebold voting machines run Windows CE. Please press any key to start voting!

>> [Enter]

Are you sure you want to vote today?
(Allow/Deny)

>> Allow

*An anthropomorphic paper clip appears*
"Hi! I'm Clippy, I see you're trying to vote!"
"Let me help you with that! Which of these do you enjoy the most:"
A) Fear Mongering
B) Economy Stunting Taxation ...

Yeah, I can't wait to vote this year ...

Re:What's the Problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hi! I'm Clippy, I see you're trying to vote!"
"Let me help you with that! Which of these do you enjoy the most:"
A) Fear Mongering
B) Economy Stunting Taxation You forgot
C) Future Crippling Tax Cuts

Or is McCain lumped under "Fear Mongering" with Hillary?

Re:What's the Problem?

[SiriusStarr]

Please wait a moment while your votes are uploaded...
AN UNHANDLED EXCEPTION HAS OCCURRED... PRESS CTRL-ALT-DEL TO RESTART YOUR COMPUTER.

or...

Please wait a moment while your votes are uploaded...
That function is a Windows Genuine Advantage (tm) feature only. Please install the ActiveX verification toolbar and click "Verify!" to continue. To learn more about the advantages of genuine Microsoft software, please visit...

Re:What's the Problem?

[funkdancer]

All I have to say is that it's a good thing Microsoft isn't running the 2008 Presidential Election! Haha, modded redunant. That's funny. :)

Re:What's the Problem?

[CodeBuster]

which is why it doesn't really matter. The standards which can actually be implemented and have an open source reference implementation, such as the Open Document Format (ODF), will become the de-facto standards at least for archive and long term storage. Also, there will be tremendous pressure on Microsoft to at least implement ODF for their Office products and probably to make that the default save format as well. However, it would be nice if the standards could allow for optional extensions which are not required (I believe that the TIFF format for images allows this) but could be used by programs which want to add enhancements, but allow readability and editing in other programs which only meet the minimum standards. Perhaps this is already a feature or could someone with more detailed knowledge about ODF comment?

Re:What's the Problem?

[Bu11etmagnet]

The standards which can actually be implemented and have an open source reference implementation, such as the Open Document Format (ODF), will become the de-facto standards at least for archive and long term storage.

I find your lack of realism...disturbing

Re:What's the Problem?

[CodeBuster]

The European Commission might freeze Microsoft out of all government sales in member nations and continue to fine them daily if they chose to be stubborn on the issue. It would be far less costly for Microsoft to simply comply then to have the door slammed in certain markets because they want to make a point on OOXML. The Europeans have their number and they will force them to either dance to their tune or abandon Europe.

Re:What's the Problem?

[danskal]

"B) Economy Stunting Taxation ... " BZZZZZ.... wrong!!! There's nothing stunted about the scandinavian economies (other than the US economy & subprime crisis dragging them down slightly at the moment), and they have some of the highest tax rates in the world.
If tax money is used to lubricate the wheels of commerce, by ensuring a fit, well-educated, flexible, motivated work force, and by ensuring that infrastructure just works, that monopolies aren't abused etc.. Then there is no reason for taxation, within reason, to be a problem. I guess the logic is that sometimes, an intelligent government, voted for by the people and working for the people, can spend/invest the people's money more wisely then they can themselves.

Re:What's the Problem?

[fbjon]

The real problem is not with how much taxes are collected, it's the "intelligent government" part. I think a part of the problem is that the larger the government or governing structure is (in terms of people and country size, not legislation), the more it becomes an inefficient sieve rather than funnel.

On one hand, a person should indeed be free to live as one sees fit, including spending. But on the other hand, people are stupid, so electing smart people and raising taxes seems like a win to me. That just leaves the "election" part, then. Now what to do about that.....

Re:What's the Problem?

[Z34107]

an intelligent government, voted for by the people and working for the people, can spend/invest the people's money more wisely then they can themselves

"Intelligent" government? That can spend my money "more wisely" than I can? I'm glad you're separated from my government by an ocean.

If people are too dumb (in your opinion) to handle budgeting their own money, they're not going to elect people who are any better. The other problem is you don't "lubricate the wheels of commerce" by taking huge amounts of money from business. Even if you give it back to them again, all you did was give them what they had to begin with - minus the salaries of the federal employees necessary to do the taking.

I'd also like to point out that we have the highest quality health care in the world, and the best higher education. But let's ignore all of that - if you replace all consumer spending with government spending, you haven't changed a country's wealth at all.

Re:What's the Problem?

[marnues]

The best health care and education systems in the world no doubt. And a good thing only 5% of the population value either since they're the only ones that can afford them! Otherwise we might lose a bit of quality due to all those plebiscites demanding their equal and earned share.

Re:What's the Problem?

[rtb61]

Technically

OOXML: "The 'WORST' Standard money can buy."

Good standards generally have a lot of money spent on 'preventing' them from being approved as they tend to clean up industries and enable the tackling and removal of the fly by night element.

Corrupt standards are of course about nothing but entrenching monopolies or blatant patent traps.

Re:What's the Problem?

[cmorriss]

Everyone always points to the Scandinavian countries as the model socialist system. That's all well and good when you're exporting the 3rd most oil in the WORLD and the money goes directly to the government.

In Norway, fully 25% of GDP comes from oil production. If they didn't have that massive influx of money, especially compared to population size, do you think it would be so easy to have that wonderful socialized government? I think not.

It is simply not a reproduceable situation. In other words, BZZZZZ.... wrong!!!!

More information here: http://www.norway.org.uk/policy/trade/oil/oil.htm

Re:What's the Problem?

[Z34107]

Taking the cash from Larry Elison that he was going to dump into an insanely costly mega-yacht, distributing that to low-income people, who will in turn spend it in more geographically diverse areas, than say, the 100-miles surrounding a yacht-building shipyard, has a measurable net economic benefit. Reply to This

As you say "right or wrongness aside," let's ignore for a moment whether or not it's right or wrong to take money from someone who has gained it legally.

Do you think that nobody works at the yacht-building shipyard? That the marine industry isn't filled with those blue-collar, union jobs like wielders and machinists? That none of these people have families?

You argue that distributing his money instead to low-income people will spend it in a more "geographically diverse area." That point is debatable, but do you really think that nobody who works at the shipyard will spend any of their income? That they won't buy groceries that are shipped from across the country before the end up in the store? That they won't purchase anything over the internet? That everything they buy will be in-state, and that everything the employees of those in-state companies buy will also be in state?

Spreading money around in that way doesn't have any economic benefit. $100 in one place or $10 in 10 places, you still have the same $100 and the same multiplier.

Your other point "Government can easily take from those that have a surplus, and redistribute to those who otherwise would have a net zero or a deficit of assets or cash." Except that they don't stop at bilking the "top 5%" that everyone seems to hate for whatever reason; the middle class has way more money than the top 5%, and far fewer lobbyists. Do you think the government would only tax those top 5%, even if it was possible to force them to pay? Remember that the Beatles came to America from Britain when the income tax rate for their bracket was 98% - listen to Taxman.

I understand that anti-socialist rhetoric is unpopular on Slashdot, but these ideas are silly and dangerous. A few other things to chew over: Why settle for a "living wage" - why not just set minimum wage to $100 million an hour? Why not have 100% income tax on the top 5%? Of course the "top 5%" could never creep down to include the middle class, and the middle class will never creep up to what was once the "top 5%." Why not put a price ceiling on food - it's unfair for WalMart to profit exorbitantly from what the poor and everyone else need to live, isn't it? Why not make the ceiling $0 - it should be illegal to charge for a basic necessity, shouldn't it? And so on.

Re:What's the Problem?

[haeger]

What about Sweden,Denmark and Finland then? No oil there, just industry and forest (well, not so much forest in Denmark). Yes, techically only Sweden is a Scandinavian country along with Norway, but the nordic countries are often lumped together.
Still. If we want to be precise, how do you think Sweden is doing? They have insane taxes too but imho they aren't doing too bad. Could be better, always can, but all in all not bad.

.haeger

Re:What's the Problem?

[bigpat]

Well, if you look at taxation as a percentage of GDP, then it is kinda a lie since the US GDP is being propped up by huge government borrowing and trade deficits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP

Still, I think the difference is that in those other countries that wealth is being taxed and redistributed efficiently to make most people happy at the expense of a little freedom. But in the US the wealth is being concentrated and controlled through taxation in a corrupting way that reduces freedom without much benefit of wealth redistribution.

Re:What's the Problem?

[Chrisq]

The problem is that you or I know that OOXML is useless as a standard, but the people in governments that specify only standard formats will just see the "ISO standard" designation.

Worse than that, if they decide against Microsoft on the grounds that it is not a standard they could be sued for not following their own procurement policies. Granted new tenders can be changed to avoid this but those in the pipeline will be in danger. Of course they will probably just bribe the officials like in the OOXML vote anyway.

Re:What's the Problem?

[h4rm0ny]

I'd be happy to continue this via e-mail.

Please continue things like this on Slashdot. Many of us come here mainly so we can read the debates that go on and it's a shame if an interesting one retires to private email discussion. That was a fascinating post.

Re:What's the Problem?

[GauteL]

Next, the middle class does not have more money than the top 5%. You are falsely stating this as fact. In fact, the top 1% holds 33% of all wealth and, the top 20% holds 51% of all wealth. The middle and lower class - the 80% of the country - hold just 16% of the wealth. I want to preempt anyone complaining about your maths. What you mean is that the "rest of the top 20%, apart from the top 1%" holds 51% of all wealth. Oherwise you'd be very wrong in adding the 33% to the 51% to get 84%.

But the figures I assume you cite (*), does indeed support that the bottom 80% owns only 16%.

(*) Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2004).

In my opinion democracy is an illusion as long as 20% of the people own 84% of the wealth.

The bottom 80% simply have no way of making informed opinions based on sources that aren't owned by the top 20%.

Re:What's the Problem?

[GauteL]

Ah.. the fallacy of using Norway as an example of Scandinavia...

In fact, Norway is the odd one out in Scandinavia. The one country that has consistently done far worse than any of it's neighbours if you disregard oil money.
Denmark, Sweden and Finland all have very high standards of living without enormous quantities of oil. This is despite years upon years of Social Democratic government, socialised medicine (that nobody in their right mind ever suggests getting rid of), high taxes and a strong welfare system.

So you are in fact BZZZZZZZZ... wrong!!!!

Denmark has a net export of ~150.000 barrels of oil per day, compared to Norway's 3 million barrels per day. Sweden and Finland are both net importers.

(Sources for the oil export/import are the CIA factbook).

And yes, I am Norwegian.

Re:What's the Problem?

[JAlexoi]

You are probably a republican?
Though I see nothing wrong with your way in theory, there is one huge flaw in current world.
People are specializing, at a staggering speed.
Why do I have to manage my taxes, if the company I work for has a huge force of accountants on payroll?
When you say, we need less government involvement in our lives, that is OK to an extent, but comes with a price. People have to do all the stuff that the government is not involved with. By my standards that leaves me with a LOT of work. And a legal system with common sense not a valid legal term, does not simplify anything. I mean I can understand my countries
And next time someone from Europe calls you stupid, remember that the time you spent on tax declaration and other stuff that could have been gathered(and probably is gathered) by the government, could have been spent on more enjoyable passtimes, maybe even learning something new?

Re:What's the Problem?

[QuoteMstr]

Thank you for your fascinating post. I find myself wondering though, why you are a "hardcore libertarian" despite your solid grasp of the economics. Clearly, a very high top tax rate, strong corporate regulation, and an extensive public welfare system lead to an equitable society. What is the downside, and why would you oppose these kinds of regulations?

Re:What's the Problem?

[tbannist]

I'm not sure Microsoft is going to look at it that way. I think they going to look at it more in terms of these numbers: They can risk 1 million dollars a day in fines from the EU or they can risk 27 million dollars a day by eroding their proprietary lock-in on MS Office. What do you think they'll do?

As far as been banned from Government sales, they're probably pretty sure they can bribe their way out of that for less than $365 million.

Re:What's the Problem?

[Rod Blackwood]

The standards which can actually be implemented and have an open source reference implementation, such as the Open Document Format (ODF), will become the de-facto standards The man has a point. Back in 1984, SGML was fast-tracked by IBM and some major customers and it didn't get a fully conforming implementation until about 1990, by which time everyone had realised what a camel it was. By contrast, XML had amazing success from the start because (IMHO) it was a simpler, was a freely available standard, and had open source implementations from the start.

Re:What's the Problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tremendous pressure? From... who? What universe do you live in? Where is this tremendous pressure going to come from?

Re:What's the Problem?

[CodeBuster]

Perhaps, but the EU can increase the daily fine (they have done this at least once already) or raise the stakes in other ways (i.e. an outright ban) if they feel the Microsoft is in willful and flagrant violation of the EU rulings.

Re:What's the Problem?

[h4rm0ny]

I'm really sorry to hear about your house. I'm not sure what you mean by it getting picked up by Slashdot. You mean they ran a story on it or there were lots of posters commenting on it or something? At any rate, people wearing the old anal ear warmers is frustrating - no argument there, but please don't let it shut you up. :)

Regards,
H.

Re:What's the Problem?

[the_arrow]

Do you think that nobody works at the yacht-building shipyard? That the marine industry isn't filled with those blue-collar, union jobs like wielders and machinists? That none of these people have families?
From an economics only perspective, employees contributing to luxury industries have a far lower value to the economy as a whole. They produce less useful goods per person. The materials they use are vastly more expensive.

Not only that, but the yacht is probably not build in the USA which means that the money spent is virtually lost (from a US standpoint).

Re:What's the Problem?

[RockDoctor]

They can risk 1 million dollars a day in fines from the EU or they can risk 27 million dollars a day by eroding their proprietary lock-in on MS Office.

Or a third (but by no means final) option would be to require all documents submitted to any branch of government to be in a format provably compliant with a (specified) version of ODF. Start with the education systems (11y.o. schoolkid submits coursework in a Wrod .DOC file - the score is zero, the work is unopened, the mark is entered into the record as part of the final course score ; exam companies are told in no uncertain terms to put future exam terminology in ODF terminology ; national curriculum standards require education about the importance of data format endurance and non-propitiatory-ness); move on to the taxation and legal systems over the next year or so.
Terrifyingly for MS, in a very short period there would be a whole society growing up with open source file formats, and anyone providing software for any government agency will have to learn how to do it in a non-propitiatory format.
The latter is already happening - in my work we've had to start putting in government-compliant files for final delivery to clients.

You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[omkhar]

And why is that an issue? The job of ISO is to develop the standard in an implementable fashion. Top down.

Not a bottom up, adopt the lowest common denominator of whats already out there

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Richard Steiner]

Without a reference implementation, how do you know a standard is valid?

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[somersault]

Wha? Valid in what respects? The standard is meant to be the reference for the implementation, not the other way round.

This story is one of the funniest I've seen for a while though :)

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[dvice_null]

> Wha? Valid in what respects?

Valid as in possible to implement. How could a standard not be possible to implement you ask? Well that is simple. E.g. write a program that follows this standard:
1. It must print "1" on exit
2. It must print "2" on exit

As you can see, it would not be possible to implement a program according to that standard. That is why someone would need to write a reference application implementing the standard to notice errors like this. Before the standard is given to the whole world to be implemented.

It is better that only one has to wonder the errors of the standards, rather than the whole world.

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[hardburn]

You need at least one coded reference implementation or else you'll end up with something in the standard which is difficult/impossible to implement. Especially in a 6,000+ page standard.

ISO would be well advised to take the method the IETF uses, which is to have two independent teams implement the standard based on the documentation before an RFC can reach a Draft Standard status. I suspect ODF would have only benefited from this process by cutting down its rough edges, while OOXML would have been so cumbersome that it would be simply dropped.

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

And why is that an issue? The job of ISO is to develop the standard in an implementable fashion. Top down.

That explains why OSI is such a trainwreck compared to IP.

Not a bottom up

So why was ODF approved, then? Or ISO C?

adopt the lowest common denominator of whats already out there

"Lowest common denominator" is not equivalent to bottom-up design.

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Wha? Valid in what respects? The standard is meant to be the reference for the implementation, not the other way round.

So you think widely-adopted standards are generally just pulled out of someone's backside?

I suggest you read BCP 9.

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Skrapion]

Not a bottom up, adopt the lowest common denominator of whats already out there Sure, the ISO does that a lot, and it's a fine approach. But that takes time, which is why the fast-track process was designed for standards which have already been implemented.

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Anonymous Coward]

write a program that follows this standard:
1. It must print "1" on exit
2. It must print "2" on exit onExit() {
      print("1");
      print("2");
}

What's so hard about that?

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Anonymous Coward]

It could print "1" and then "2" on exit and be valid under that standard.

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[thehickcoder]

Easy:

print '12';

What? You didn't say it had to print only 1 or 2. :)

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[davidkv]

There's a fundamental difference between the IETF and ISO. IETF makes standards of stuff that has been proven to work (or at least be implementable), whereas ISO wants to write specs to tell people what should work.

A bit like comparing tcp/ip and whatsitsname (x400?). It doesn't really matter how nice something looks on paper if there's no good implementation of it.

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Bill_the_Engineer]

They could fast track it and say the program must print "12" on exit.

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[bryce4president]

You need to think outside the box. 2 birds, 1 stone, my program prints 12

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[MountainMan101]

The microsoft implementation would print "1" on Vista Home, "2" on Professional and "12" on Premium. It prints "4" on Linux just to prove it's linux that is broken. On Mac OS X it would print "1" and then "2" if you paid $50 more.

Actually, what am I saying. A M$ program exiting cleanly.... ha ha

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Anonymous Coward]

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

void print_one(void)
{
    printf("1\n");
}

void print_two(void)
{
    printf("2\n");
}

int main(void)
{
    atexit(print_one);
    atexit(print_two);
    printf("Now exiting...\n");
    return 0;
}

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Anonymous Coward]

E.g. write a program that follows this standard:
1. It must print "1" on exit
2. It must print "2" on exit

As you can see, it would not be possible to implement a program according to that standard. Counter example: a program that prints "1" and prints "2" on exit. Therefore your claim that it is not possible to implement such a program is invalid, as you didn't specify the word "only".

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Without a reference implementation, how do you know a standard is valid?

How has this problem been addressed for all the other standards that lack a reference implementation, such as ODF?

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[RelaxedTension]

Or, in keeping with what is in there now, it would be:

"Must act like the previous reference program acted, using natural or integer numbers that are rounded up to 12, except where previously mentioned previous reference program dictates otherwise, in theory or in practice. Unless we decide differently at some future point of our choosing for any reason we want."

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[jzhos]

ask OSI people

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[serviscope_minor]

So why was ODF approved, then? Or ISO C?

Well, C99 took known working parts from a bunch of places, including existing C and C-like languages. For instance // comments, free positioning of variable declarations were allowed in C++, and allowed in some C implementations. restrict was known good for optimization (from FORTRAN). Variable length arrayswere also around here and there, and I believe that some implementations had some complex number support as well. C99 worked out OK, since it was in many ways rather conservative.

And then there was C++. export never had a working implementation, and sounded good on paper. And the result was a disaster. It took years before anyone successfully implemented, amssively increased the complexity of the compilers and was of dubious benefit. Since it's has such poor support it is barely used in practice. Sadly, it is not being expunged from C++0x. And it's a perfect example of why it's useful to have a reference implementation.

GCC is now doing a very good job of tracking the draft C++0x standard, so the parts that aren't obvious (as in have workalike features in major compilers already) will be tested before actual standardisation.

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Anonymous Coward]

which is why the fast-track process was designed for standards which have already been implemented by more than one vendor

There. Fixed that for you. Or did you think you could get away with that?

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[somersault]

I wasn't saying that the standard had to come first, but I didn't see how one could be 'invalid' per se. Others have helpfully pointed out that the standard could have paradoxical or otherwise impossible requirements though, which I s'pose makes sense. I didn't consider that at all, but in a sufficiently complex standard with different parts defined by different people, I guess it could happen pretty easily..

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, why not just print "12"? The standard didn't say the 1 and 2 had to be printed on their own did it? ;)

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[naer_dinsul]

Or even better... We could spawn two threads, one to handle each print. That way we could never be quite sure what order they'd appear in!

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[SaturnNiGHTS]

that's x500, right?

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[JonathanR]

Since we are having so many problesm with ones and twos, may I ask whether this make us constipated or incontinent.

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[jimicus]

that's x500, right? See? It's so broken, the poster you're replying to couldn't even remember its name!

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Anonymous Coward]

hum? lowest common denominator? You do realize that there is not even a common ASCII text representation format (CR/LF issues mainly)?

Here's your lowest common denominator: /[a-zA-Z0-9;:,.'"/\\\?=+-_[]{}|`~ !@#$%^&*()]*/
At least you won't need 6000+ pages to describe it...

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Anonymous Coward]

print("1"); is not the exit point, if print("2"); happens afterwards.

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Anonymous Coward]

write a program that follows this standard:
1. It must print "1" on exit
2. It must print "2" on exit onExit() {

      print("1");

      print("2");
}

What's so hard about that? A perfect example of how things can (and will) go wrong:
    The original spec was put in place hastily, for a single purpose("print exactly the single digit 1" etc.), and without considering the bigger picture.
    Then some other guy comes along, and does it's best to interpret it (let's assume some naive poster not actually out to prove someone wrong!)
      The resulting output is "12", "21", "
2
1 ", satellite crashing into the moon, or a printer jamming because some bloke tried to print the number 2 out of margin.

    It was a bad standard to begin with!

Re:You're missing the point of an ISO standard

[Skrynesaver]

There are complete implementations of X.500, however it would be better compared to LDAP, which is a stripped down version of the protocol that can be understood and implemented by mere mortals. Perhaps you meant OSI V's TCP/IP DISCLAIMER: I work for a Co. that has a complete X.500 capable/LDAP server (Depending on how you call the directoryrc)

Does anyone know if Open Office is compliant with

[notaprguy]

the Open Document Format? Just curious.

Technical Details

[Enderandrew]

Technical details mean absolutely nothing in this discussion. I thought we established this.

Re:Technical Details

[sm62704]

122,000 Errors? That's a lot of "technical details!" Yikes!

Re:Technical Details

[Anonymous Coward]

122,000 times nothing is still nothing

Re:Technical Details

[Iamthecheese]

122,000 Errors? Thats, what, one error per 100,000 lines of the standard? I'd say they did a damn good job!

So are most MS Word files

[EmbeddedJanitor]

You just use this conversion tool called Open Office

PWNED!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow, this fails to surprise me... Microsoft pushes a crappy standard that they won't even follow. This just keep getting better and better.

*XML IS DYING

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: *XML is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *XML community...

Stop using MiB

[hedleyroos]

Men in Black? What happened to good old megabytes? The article says 17MB!

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

Men in Black? What happened to good old megabytes? The article says 17MB! Maybe, but I make this shit look GOOD.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a lot of this happening in Wikipedia articles lately, too. Someone let the hyperpedantic nerds out of their basements to confuse every normal person on the fucking planet.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Richard Steiner]

Shh... The submitter is trying to impose those trendy "base 2" SI prefixes on us in spite of 40+ years of prior art to the contrary. Another case of ivory tower types not being sophisticated enough to grok current industry usage, methinks...

And don't even get me started on folks who assume a byte is always eight (b) bits. There's a reason folks in the Real World use the term "octet", people. Really.

Sheesh! :-) :-)

Re:Stop using MiB

[Duradin]

They've probably been hit with the neuralizer one too many times.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

The "good old megabytes" is what's confusing people who buy "500GB" drives only to find out that their OS tells them it's only 465.66GB (GiB).

Just because some people made the mistake, decades ago, of choosing to equal kilo to 1024 doesn't mean they were right.

And just because most people in the USA only see "kilo" with computer tems doesn't mean it sounds right to the rest of this planet. A kilometer is not 1024 meter.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Digi-John]

I see a lot of this happening in Wikipedia articles lately, too. Someone let the hyperpedantic nerds out of their basements to confuse every normal person on the fucking planet.

Similar to the new prevalence of BCE and CE vs. BC and AD. Come on, you must admit that "Anno Domine" is far cooler than "Current/Christian Era". Up next, we change "Wednesday" to "Threeday", because references to Odin are just far too Euro-centric. That is, assuming we stick with that Judeo-Christian concept about Sunday being the seventh day.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Yvan256]

Just because people have been using SI prefixes to redefine that "kilo means 1024" for 40+ years doesn't mean they're right.

Also, "octet" is the french word for "byte", so it's also 8-bit. :P

Re:Stop using MiB

[hardburn]

More like fixing 40+ years of hard drive manufacturers lieing to us about storage space.

Re:Stop using MiB

[BorgCopyeditor]

Yes, so plainly the remedy is to silently replace "megabytes" and "kilobytes" with unpronounceable sound-alikes that are graphically indistinct in their abbreviated form.

Geeks insist that the new units of measurement are inherently more "rational." This penetrating insight, of course, is what led to the development and widespread acceptance of the superior metric hour.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Richard Steiner]

Note to self: b != 8. :-)

Re:Stop using MiB

[jedidiah]

Consumers were confused by corporations willing to redefine terms to
suit their own avarice and fools like you willing to tolerate it.

A real megabyte is divisible by an order of magnitude in the relevant
counting system. A psuedo-megabyte is not. This sort of fiat standard
is not supposed to be the point of SI. Computational convenience is.

The fact that parallel sets of jargon are needed to keep track of both
just demonstrates how absurd it is to treat computer memory as if it
were a rack of lamb.

This confusion did not exist until the likes of Seagate chose to create
it for their own benefit.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, "octet" is the french word for "byte", so it's also 8-bit. :P

Pedantry alert: that's the point, he's saying we should use the term 'octet' for 8 bits, rather than 'byte'.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

That is, assuming we stick with that Judeo-Christian concept about Sunday being the seventh day

Unless you talk to Seventh Day Adventist religion followers who say that Saturday is the seventh day.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Richard Steiner]

Language is typically defined by usage, not the other way around. Unless you're the French, perhaps. :-)

Remember that "kilo" *did* (and does) mean 1024 in a computing context. Everybody understood that who was involved on a technical level. Everybody. There was no miscommunication in the general case ... except when it came to laypeople who largely didn't understand what was described in the first place. When that happened, we just told them that bigger is better and moved on...

Your comment about octet confuses and annoys me. Go away. :-)

Re:Stop using MiB

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

40+ years of prior art to the contrary

"1 MW" has always meant 1,000,000 watts. "9.6 kbps" has always meant 9,600 bits per second. A "500 GB" hard drive still means 500,000,000,000 bytes.

There are relatively few places where this is screwed up, most of which fall into these categories:

• RAM or things derived from RAM (e.g. page sizes) where the physical layout imply powers of 2
• Microsoft

The latter doesn't even get it consistent. "1.44 MB" floppies are actually 1440 * 1024 bytes.

Another case of ivory tower types not being sophisticated enough to grok current industry usage, methinks...

"Current industry usage" is to be ambiguous; 17 MB means "somewhere between 16 and 18 megabytes". The people you call "ivory tower types", including the IEC, are trying to use more precise language.

And don't even get me started on folks who assume a byte is always eight (b) bits. There's a reason folks in the Real World use the term "octet", people.

The term "octet" does exactly the same thing that the binary prefixes do: They indicate more precisely what is being talked about.

As someone else in this thread said, "just because some people made the mistake, decades ago, of choosing to equal kilo to 1024 doesn't mean they were right."

Re:Stop using MiB

[k33l0r]

What happened to good old megabytes?

There are fairly valid reasons to use the "official" IEEE 1541 prefixes.

Since a gigabyte can be taken to mean either 2^30 bytes (real people) or 10^3 bytes (HDD manufacturers) this leads to a fairly substantial error, especially when one considers volume sizes today.

Sure one can contend that using plain bytes, or even bits, eliminates this problem but most folks (myself included) have trouble comprehending extremely large/long numbers, at least at a glance.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Moridineas]

Not to mention UTC/GMT. That's very literally eurocentric. It's gotta go. Let's switch over to UMT (that's Universal Mecca Time -- BBC article).

(though as a minor nit, I've generally seen BCE/CE explained as "Common Era." I always use BC/AD though)

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

Pedantry, but it's Anno Domini ('in [the] year of [the ] Lord'). Anno Domine means 'In [the] year, O Lord'.

Re:Stop using MiB

[k33l0r]

Uh, to quote Wikipedia (all hail the omniscience of it.):

In Jewish and Christian tradition, the first day of the seven day week is Sunday.

Re:Stop using MiB

[psychodelicacy]

Why do discussions over really quite minor issues such as these always have to degenerate into personal slanging matches? No-one's a "fool" just because they didn't fight to the death over this terminology.

Oh, and I've been trying for half an hour to make a "rack of lamb"/"lack of RAM" pun here, but have to admit defeat. Anyone?

Re:Stop using MiB

[psychodelicacy]

To be fair, we don't use "hour" to mean "sixty minutes" in every context except computing, where it means "fifty-eight and a half minutes". The rationality lies in the removal of confusion, as much as in the units themselves.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Tony Hoyle]

HDD manufacturers only started to use 10^3 comparatively recently... they did it because they could lie about the disk size basically.. marketing people make me sick sometimes.

Re:Stop using MiB

[menace3society]

No, no, no, no, no, you've got it all wrong. Saturday is the seventh day. In Judaism, it's the Sabbath, the day the Lord rested after creation.

In Christianity, which according to itself supersedes Judaism, it is now proper to keep the Sabbath on the Sunday, that is to say the first day of the week, because that is the day Christ rose from the dead and opened the gates to the kingdom of Heaven.

Certain Quaker groups still refer to days and months by numbers, First Day, Tenth Month, etc., so you're not too far off there.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Digi-John]

Ok, so I suck at religion.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Tony Hoyle]

Yeah the seventh day is Saturday. Jews rest on that day. Christians developed the habit of meeting on the first day of the week (Sunday) fairly early on, and that still largely applies.

It's a fairly common misconception to think Sunday is the rest day (in modern usage it probably is.. depends on how you define it I guess).

Re:Stop using MiB

[k33l0r]

There's a reason folks in the Real World use the term "octet"

I take offence at a number issues in your post.

First of all could you please explain to me why I should take somebody who decorates his opinions with emoticons and "Sheesh" seriously?

Secondly, who are these "folks in the Real World" you speak of? This is is pretty much the first time I've seen 'octet' used, in either the real or imitation world.

Thirdly, I'm not about to use a musical ensemble to describe the size of anything.

As for the "40+ years of prior art", this is hardly the first time standards are changed. Many of the SI measurements, for example, have been changed, despite prior usage of other terms and definitions, sometimes going back hundreds of years.

Re:Stop using MiB

[k33l0r]

Oh no, I would never go as far as to criticise somebody's religious concepts. OK, maybe I would, but that's not the point. What I was trying to say is that you suck at general knowledge.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Yvan256]

If language is defined by usage, does that mean that copyright infringement now equals theft? ;-)

You have never seen the confusion of metric users entering the CS field, have you? Ever seen a teacher struggle with the very same point we're having right now?

As I said, in the rest of the world, kilo means 1000, not 1024. And here you're saying it becomes something else because a particular field has abused it for 40 years?

Also note that both hard drive manufacturers and digital telecommunications, in a computing context, use 1000 for kilo.

So your argument becomes "if you're in a computing context BUT not talking about hard drives OR telecommunications, then kilo means 1024"...

I'd rather use KiB=1024, thank you very much. :-)

Re:Stop using MiB

[BKX]

Two mistakes:

1. It's "Common Era".
2. Replace Judeo-Christian with Christian. The Jews aligned their calendar with the Romans such that the Sabbath (Saturday) fell on the last day of the week (which, according to the Romans was Saturday.). The Christians decided that they would celebrate their new prophet on the first day of the week (Since most early Christians were originally of the Roman religion rather than Jewish, they equated Jesus with Sol, their Sun god, who was worshipped weekly on Sunday.). Later that celebration merged with the Sabbath concept, but the day of Sunday stuck, only now most people erroneously think of it as the end of the week.

Re:Stop using MiB

[slack_prad]

It's SI system.

Re:Stop using MiB

[h4rm0ny]

Ah, but you see when hard drive marketeers realised that they could make their drives seem bigger for less cost by re-defining the term, it was just too tempting to pass up, despite the confusion it would inevitably cause. Hopefully, the odd people who insist there is some sort of authority to their redefined terms despite the long established and uncontested history of a different meaning, will go away again with time. To use 1,000B is not merely different to the normal meaning, but for practical purposes less useful.

Re:Stop using MiB

[EggyToast]

Exactly, and then the old canard that you "lose some to formatting" still has people complaining about the difference in size on the box compared to what their computer tells them.

If the computer, which is the only device that will ever use their hard drive, gives them a capacity, that is the size the hard drive should be told at. I'll accept GiB and MiB when my computer tells me that's how much space I have left on my computer. Until then, I'll just keep telling people that companies are using SI units instead of computer terminology in order to inflate their numbers.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Evil Pete]

True, but in this modern age let's face it the first day is really Monday. When we all get the horrible shock of returning to work etc. Then the countdown starts, with the 'clock' reset next Monday.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Digi-John]

Referring to the Wikipedia article, I see it referred to as Common, Current, and Christian. Pick your favorite.

Re:Stop using MiB

[alphamugwump]

The term 'octet' is frequently found in specifications for network protocols, because a lot of network protocols were written way back in the day when some computers had nine bit bytes. Also, you missed the joke completely and utterly.

Re:Stop using MiB

[TheRaven64]

Also, "octet" is the french word for "byte", so it's also 8-bit. :P Actually, octet is the French word for octet, it's just that on most modern architectures a byte is an octet. The term byte is not popular in France for two reasons. The first is that bit and byte are pronounced the same way in France. The second is that both sound like a French colloquial word for a penis.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

Since a gigabyte can be taken to mean either 2^30 bytes (real people) or 10^3 bytes... I think that even my grandmother can probably tell the difference between 1073741824 and 1000. Don't you mean "10^9 bytes"...? :)

Re:Stop using MiB

[EvanED]

A real megabyte is divisible by an order of magnitude in the relevant
counting system.

Why is it always 2 that's the relevant counting system?

For instance, take the hard drive example. Why are we seeing drives with 200 billion bytes, 250 billion bytes, 500 billion bytes, etc. if 2 is the relevant counting system? If there was something about hard drives that made powers of 2 easier or more natural and the manufacturers kept advertising in base 10, you would expect to see hard drives with 192 GB, 256 GB, or 512 GB.

This confusion did not exist until the likes of Seagate chose to create
it for their own benefit.

What about the network guys. They use powers of 10. And floppy disks used 1 MB = 1000 * 1024 bytes.

Re:Stop using MiB

[gbjbaanb]

Also note that both hard drive manufacturers and digital telecommunications, in a computing context, use 1000 for kilo. Also note that both hard drive manufacturers and digital telecommunications, in a marketing context, use 1000 for kilo.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Stop using MiB

[gbjbaanb]

Geeks insist that the new units of measurement are inherently more "rational." This penetrating insight, of course, is what leads them to not getting laid. :-)

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it doesn't, and didn't.

The problem is not with the people who use the data true, the problem is that the SI standards of Kilo, Mega etc... were here first and apply to device construction. The problem is in networking and to a degree harddrives, not software. If you ask me to build a fibre system using a laser that transmits at x KB/s, I'm clear on that, it's 1000 bytes. Not 1024, because I was trained as a physical scientist, and hardware as made by engineers and scientists requires clear specification. Everyone knows that when asked to put 44K of fuel into a plane you don't put 44K pounds of fuel in an airplane, you put 44K kilograms because the world is on SI, except the US and liberia. So some idiot puts 44k pounds of fuel in a plane and it has to glide into the azores rather than crossing the atlantic. So you have to clearly specify.

This isn't, and wasn't particlarly a problem when we were working in Kilobytes or even really megabytes, and getting kibibytes confused with kilobytes is a relatively small error, that becomes a problem when you're talking about 'Petabytes', where 1.126 * 10^15 and 1.0 * 10^15 are two rather different things, and which one is your hardware using?

As to why it was never clear, the wikipedia article is remarkably helpful: the 1.44 MB floppy, in which the 'M' as used is neither mibibytes nor megabtyes but one * the other. Confused yet? Good, that's why we have international bodies to standardize language, so you won't be anymore.

Re:Stop using MiB

[T-Bone-T]

I wouldn't call "since at least 10 years ago" "comparatively recently". They did it with my parent's first computer that had a 2GB hard drive.

Re:Stop using MiB

[benwaggoner]

Except "computing" isn't a clear-cut domain. For example, in my field of compression. Does that count as "computing" (power of 2) or telecommunications (power of 10)? Unclear?

So, we had a problem where different tools and formats defined it different ways. For a number of years, QuickTime used K=1024, while Windows Media and RealMedia used K=1000. Unless you were using Sorenson Squeeze, which "corrected" its Windows Media and RealMedia values by 1.024 so they matched the QuickTime files sizes!

Horrible.

Fortunately, the compression world has standardized on power-of-10 numbers, since that's what the MPEG standards and, well, all the professionals use.

So, now we have to do with complainsts about the mismatch between encoding a file that should be "4 GB" but doesn't fill up "4 GB" of drive space...

Sorry, 1024's got to be a KiB. No other feasible solution at this point, unless we decide to stop having computers talk to each other...

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever seen a teacher struggle with the very same point we're having right now? No, all of my CS teachers were at least somewhat competent and not easily confused about trivial issues.

Re:Stop using MiB

[amirulbahr]

I'd rather use KiB=1024, thank you very much. :-) But how do you say KiB? Is it "Kay eye bee" all the time?

Re:Stop using MiB

[zsau]

It depends on how the calendar goes. If it's a page to a week, then yeah, sure Monday starts the week. But those new-fangled monthly wall calendars which put Monday at the start of the week shit me. Wednesday should be in the middle of the week, so Sunday should be at the start.

As for me, I'm sick of paying tribute to Mars every March, and regardless of whether you can count in latin, I know "octo" means "eight", not "ten". I demand we switch to English numbers for dates, which is how we write shortform dates anway (i.e. I write that my birthday is 25/7, and say "my birthday is the twenty-fifth of the seventh"). IIRC the Japanese almost do this, although I think the say "shichi gatsu" i.e. "seven month".

Re:Stop using MiB

[hakr89]

http://xkcd.com/394/

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

KiB sounds fine. But it gets weird when you get to MiB.

Kilo => Ki is OK
Mega => Mi is daft.

I would have preferred if they had used a subscript 2 to indicate we are talking about a base-2 variant on the metric scale.

K(sub)2(/sub) => 2^10
M(sub)2(/sub) => 2^20

But, whatever, I can learn to live with what we have.

Re:Stop using MiB

[fbjon]

Incidentally, each month in Japanese has a traditional and descriptive name, but it was changed to a straight number sequence sometime before 1800.

Re:Stop using MiB

[plover]

The second is that both sound like a French colloquial word for a penis. So you're saying that in French the error file was 17 megadicks.

I suppose in English that equals, what, about 2.1 Ron Jeremies?

Re:Stop using MiB

[fbjon]

You computer is telling you capacity in GiB and MiB, they're just mislabelled.

Re:Stop using MiB

[fbjon]

In fact, do we even need to express filesizes in powers of 2 at all? Is there any reason to continue this practice other than tradition?

Re:Stop using MiB

[fbjon]

And it's an excellent solution, if it makes people stop using the 10^2 prefixes in the relatively few places where they are used.

Re:Stop using MiB

[gullevek]

500 Gigabyte is not 500 Gigabit. a bit is 1, a byte is 8 bit, thats why we have the 1024 rule.

so 500 gigabyte is not 500.000.000.000 bytes but 500 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 = 536.870.912.000

Thats why I don't get this whole strange sudden change from 1024 to 1000 not at all. It just does not make sense.

Re:Stop using MiB

[ivan256]

I smell a hacker/cracker debate coming any moment now.

Re:Stop using MiB

[benwaggoner]

Yeah, fair point. I guess thinking in binary helps keep us to our assembly roots, but it really doesn't matter all that much anymore. I can't say why it's useful for file sizes at all.

Modern OS "Properties" dialogs almost all show the actual file size in byts for this reason.

Re:Stop using MiB

[BorgCopyeditor]

Grumble grumble good point grumble grumble.

Re:Stop using MiB

[marnues]

How is this getting modded informative?!?! 9.6kbps definitely does not equal 9600 bps. It equals 9830.4 bps. The way it should be. Someone's sig has something to the effect that SI units were to be computationally convenient and not pretty looking. And that's exactly why kB = 8192 bits and will continue to mean that in both industry and academia. I don't get why this is somehow an issue... SI prefixes certainly were not meant as a religion.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

Byte me.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

Something I've always wondered, if I have a 9 bit byte, how big is my nybble?

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming you're asking seriously, the answer is "kibibyte".

Re:Stop using MiB

[Lunzo]

If you're going to correct people at least get it right :P. The majority of early Christians (1st Century AD/CE) were Jewish originally. The reason for Sunday as the day of worship has nothing to do with sun gods but its the day of the week that they believed Jesus rose from the dead.

Re:Stop using MiB

[ultranova]

Sorry, 1024's got to be a KiB. No other feasible solution at this point, unless we decide to stop having computers talk to each other...

If it's computers talking to each other, why use the prefix in the first place, rather than the raw byte/bit count ? The prefix exist for the benefit of humans, after all.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Fred_A]

Mod ++

About time somebody made sense in these stupid threads.
The SI units may sound strange now but they'll sound perfectly natural to everybody a few years from now.

Apparently nobody remembers the Internet laughing at Wired for inventing "surfing the web".

Re:Stop using MiB

[FromFrom]

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#4800_and_9600_.28V.27ter.2C_V.32.29 those modem are 9600 bits/sec! This discussion itself is proof of the confusion and the need of a good standard. Just stop being so proud that you once learned a stupid thing like 1kB=1024B:)

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that "kilo" *did* (and does) mean 1024 in a computing context. Everybody understood that who was involved on a technical level. Everybody. Except for network speeds. AFAIK those have always been measured in powers-of-ten bits per second.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

This 'Islamic science conference' referenced by the BBC was a farce.

One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca's was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.

What the hell does this mean? All lines of Longitude converge at the *geographic* North pole. Even supposing the Longitude line through Mecca *did* pass through the current position of the *magnetic* North pole (which it doesn't - not even vaguely close):
a) It didn't in the past and it won't in the future since the magnetic North pole moves constantly (by about 25m/40km per year)
b) The magnetic North pole postition is totally unsuitable for basing the prime meridian on (I can't imagine what screwy time zones etc. you'd get trying to use it even if you took some sort of average position so it didn't move every year).

If 'Islamic science' is based on such things as geologists who don't even know the difference between the magnetic and geographic North poles it can't have much going for it.

Why not just say 'Mecca is the most important city in the world and the prime meridian should therefore run through it' (to the *geographic* North pole). It ain't gonna happen, but at least it makes some kind of sense.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Jesus_666]

A kilobyte is 1024 bytes.
A megabyte is 1024 * 1000 = 1024000 bytes.

We have multiple definitions of what "mega-" means, so let's just go with the one used in the 3.5" floppy disk.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Jesus_666]

For transfer rates, "kilo-" usually means "1000". Transferring 1 kB of data at 1 kB/s takes longer than one second because 1 kB of storage != 1 kB of bandwidth.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Jesus_666]

Where does 1024 follow from a byte having eight bits? 1024 is not a power of eight. It's divisible by eight, but so are more reaonable numbers like 512, 4096 or 32768.

But still, if we assume a byte to be one unit we can as well use powers of ten.


Of course you could argue that the tendency of certain things (like RAM chips) to have sizes that are powers of two might imply using a power of two in language usage. But then again, lots of other things don't use power of two (e.g. most storage media and almost everything transmission-related). Who prevails? Do we follow RAM usage and have non-fitting storage and transmission? Do we follow storage/transmission and have non-fitting RAM? Do we follow xkcd and settle on 1012 bytes per kilobyte?

Or, of course, we just use unambiguous prefixes so people know which base we use. If you don't like "kibibyte" you can lobby IEC to instead adopt "computer science (not storage) kilobyte (CSkB)" and "general standard kilobyte (GSkB)".

Re:Stop using MiB

[Evil Pete]

No I don't care what the diary says. I am talking about how we treat the week psychologically. I have never seen it as starting on Sunday that is just a weird historical issue which I ignore and increasingly other people do as well.

When I have an organiser I configure it to have the week start on a Monday. If I am programming then yeah Sunday is day 0, but that is just a magic number.

Re:Stop using MiB

[zsau]

The closest thing to a "psychological week" I have, I guess, it starts on Monday and ends on Friday and the weekend doesn't enter into it. The weekend's always been special; when I was at Uni, the weekend was the days to earn money. Now I'm working, the weekend is the days *not* to earn money.

But if the week has seven days, then as far as a start and an end works, it only matters for writing it down, and then you should have one form in a diary and another form on a calendar, because starting on a Monday has some advantages in a book, and starting on a Sunday has different advantages on a wall. But now I repeat myself.

Re:Stop using MiB

[fph il quozientatore]

you must admit that "Anno Domine" is far cooler than "Current/Christian Era".

Sure, but "Anno Domini" is even cooler

Re:Stop using MiB

[lysse]

See, this is what happens when you let Them into Our field.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Anonymous Coward]

Please note that the Windows Explorer treats kilobytes as being 1024 bytes, so OOXML is inconsistent with the file sizes a user would actually see in Windows, regardless of what "KB" might mean in another context.

Re:Stop using MiB

[franksands]

Amem to that. If you really, for some obscure reason need to use megabit and megabyte, use the lowercase b for bit and capitalized B for Byte: mb (megabit) and mB (megaByte).

Re:Stop using MiB

[Dolda2000]

Language is typically defined by usage, not the other way around. Precisely -- which is why some of us are trying to use binary prefixes as much as possible, to make that the language.

Remember that "kilo" *did* (and does) mean 1024 in a computing context. Everybody understood that who was involved on a technical level. Everybody. Except the hard drive manufacturers.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Richard Steiner]

I take offence at a number issues in your post

Good for you. Welcome to Slashdot -- contrary opinions are welcome here. :-)

First of all could you please explain to me why I should take somebody who decorates his opinions with emoticons and "Sheesh" seriously?

Such decorations are prefectly appropriate when one is feigning annoyance with something in a message. Or is humor something which is also beyond your grasp?

While I actually do think the change to the new SI units is stupid, for example, I also happen to understand the justification. However, part of me is sad that the successful context-sensitive use of the previous terms in the industry is being removed for what I consider overly pedantic reasons. The existing terms worked just fine where it mattered, and in some senses the creation of the new SI prefixes smacks more of political correctness than an actual need in the industry for those terms. It's a solution in search of a problem, IMSNShO.

Secondly, who are these "folks in the Real World" you speak of? This is is pretty much the first time I've seen 'octet' used, in either the real or imitation world.

It's a very common term in communications technical documents, various RFCs, etc., where data transfer between multiple dissimilar platforms is a not infrequent occurrence. I've even seen the term used in modem documentation for end users. Do a search on Google sometime; it might be educational. Seriously.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Richard Steiner]

If language is defined by usage, does that mean that copyright infringement now equals theft? ;-)

Hey, some people call Microsoft an "innovative" "technology" company, so anything can happen. :-)

You have never seen the confusion of metric users entering the CS field, have you?

It isn't my fault that overexposure to SI units causes brain atrophy.

Ever seen a teacher struggle with the very same point we're having right now?

Honestly? No.

So your argument becomes "if you're in a computing context BUT not talking about hard drives OR telecommunications, then kilo means 1024"...

Heh. No, it isn't that complicated.

if binary storage then
SI = base 2
else
SI - base 10
endif

The distinction is a trivial one to make unless one is dense beyond repair. Telecommunications is not storage, and drive manufacturers are abusing a term to their advantage (not the first time that marketing has abused terms ... see my references to the words "innovative" and "technology" above...

I'd rather use KiB=1024, thank you very much. :-)

Use what you want. I think those newfangled UNIX boxes are cute, too. :-)

Re:Stop using MiB

[k33l0r]

I take offence at a number issues in your post

Good for you. Welcome to Slashdot -- contrary opinions are welcome here. :-)

Thanks for pointing that out, your powers of perception amaze me to no end

However, part of me is sad that the successful context-sensitive use of the previous terms in the industry is being removed for what I consider overly pedantic reasons.

I have to say that you get sad about strange things.

It's a solution in search of a problem

No, I'd call it more of an correction. Just 'cause folks have been using the wrong terminology for 40 years doesn't make it right.

Do a search on Google sometime; it might be educational.

Educational? I baulk at the thought.

Re:Stop using MiB

[catman]

And with the number sequence, they can pun in Kanji: "nishi moku samurai".

(Google says "nishi muku samurai" but my co-workers said "moku", could be dialect differences. They also said "A samurai bows toward the west",
which I guess a samurai would not do :-) )

Re:Stop using MiB

[metamatic]

No, you're wrong. Kilo has never consistently been used to mean 1024 in computing. The same is true of mega- and giga-. Your 2 gigahertz CPU is not running at 2*1024*1024*1024 hertz.

Re:Stop using MiB

[clem.dickey]

RAM or things derived from RAM (e.g. page sizes) where the physical layout imply powers of 2

The RAM case has exceptions, too. The IBM 1401 has 1000 to 16000 bytes, er, characters of RAM, depending on the model.

Re:Stop using MiB

[Richard Steiner]

Yes, you're right. I should have been more precise and said "computer storage media (which are typically binary in nature)", not just "computing", which as you note contains a number of exceptions to my assertion.

A heck of a job, Brownie!

[llamafirst]

In a blog posting this week, Alex Brown, leader of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) group in charge of maintaining the Office Open XML (OOXML) standard, revealed that Microsoft Office 2007 documents do not meet the latest specifications of the ISO OOXML draft standard. "Word documents generated by today's version of Microsoft Office 2007 do not conform to ISO/IEC 29500," said Brown in a blog post recounting the process of testing a document against the "strict" and "transitional" schema defined in the standard.

Ahem. Let me be the first to say:
Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job!

Re:A heck of a job, Brownie!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean "hack of a job"?

Duh

[Arreez]

Seriously......anyone not see it coming? Office 2007 being submitted to this test is like submitting to a "Will it float?" test with your hands tied and the good ol' cement shoes strapped on.

Re:Duh

[jnik]

Great. Now I just want to know...will it blend?

Re:Duh

[Dunbal]

Well, that all depends on the density of the liquid you plan on throwing it in...? You can't change the laws of physics!

OK ok I agree, usually it's water, and no it doesn't float; but on slashdot, who knows!

Re:Duh

[calebt3]

You would have a hard time fitting all that paper into the blender.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is: Will it Blend?

Re:Duh

[Sponge Bath]

...good ol' cement shoes

I bet this footwear was part of the MS proposal to get fast track:
"You mind your place, mister, or you'll be wearing concrete galoshes."

Re:Duh

[Chris Mattern]

Perhaps the gentleman in the cement galoshes shouldn't have proposed going swimming in the first place, then.

You're missing the point...

[voislav98]

which is that it's the standard that's deficient. I'm sure that the standard will soon be "improved" so it conforms with Office 2007

Re:You're missing the point...

[Anonymous Coward]

Its sort of putting you genital in place of your ass and you ass in place of your genital.

Re:You're missing the point...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure, wouldn't it make more sense if MS declares that you have to upgrade your copy to meet the new standard?

Why sell a product once when you can implament a new standard and sell the same product to a captured audience a second, third, fourth time....

Re:You're missing the point...

[poot_rootbeer]

I'm sure that the standard will soon be "improved" so it conforms with Office 2007

Which would require the revised standard to go through the entire approval process again, would it not?

Microsoft just paid a lot of money to get ISO to approve a standard that they do not, and possibly can not, implement. Seems like a pointless waste of time to me.

OOXML is such a Fraud!

[Nom du Keyboard]

OOXML is such a fraud that it's disgusting that we continue to waste such time on it. If it could win on the merits it wouldn't need such underhanded tactics by its (very few) supporters. It's clearly intended as an ODF-killer by creating an unnecessary parallel "standard".

Re:OOXML is such a Fraud!

[Anonymous Coward]

How can it kill ODF?

Re:OOXML is such a Fraud!

[BearRanger]

No. It's intended to sway governments that have passed laws requiring all documents to be created using open standards. This is all about Microsoft being able to sell Office to European countries and (soon) California.

Impressive

[rumith]

While it's hardly unexpected that Office 2007 document format isn't *cough* ISO compliant, 122k errors for a 60Mb file results into a remarkable ~500 bytes of markup per error.

I really do not understand where Microsoft is heading. They've rammed their miserable OOXML format through - supposedly so they could advertise their product as ISO compliant. But what's their advantage now that their product is shown to be so horribly incompatible?

Re:Impressive

[SatanicPuppy]

If the open standard is bloated and buggy, then people will keep using the closed formats.

Microsoft has zero percentage in having a good, workable, open format.

Re:Impressive

[Yvan256]

What if their goal was to promote "open formats" as being incredibly difficult to be compatible with, that all open format documents (and their content) were at risk, and that closed, controlled proprietary formats were the only sane choice?

Re:Impressive

[daveime]

This IS XML we are talking about ... even transmitting a boolean yes or no which should in principle take 1 bit becomes :-

<xml schema="http:fuckingxml.com">
<myboolean>
TRUE
</myboolean>
</xml>

On that basis, 500 bytes per error probably equates to around 1.152 bits of "useful" error information.

Rather than standardize even more bloated crap, on this occasion I applaud MS for comitting OOXML to the early grave it deserves, by failing to even pass the tests on a standard they effectively created (and paid a lot of money) to get approved.

Re:Impressive

[PitaBred]

Except that open standards are usually government mandated. Microsoft would have otherwise ignored it completely, going with the lock-in you describe since they "own" the office landscape. They submitted OOXML because they didn't want to be locked out of new gov't initiatives requiring more accessible data formats, so they forced their crap through trying to call it open, while not really being so.

Re:Impressive

[vidarh]

Just because you're as incompetent when it comes to designing sane XML schemas as Microsoft doesn't mean a well designed XML based format would be anywhere near that verbose.

Re:Impressive

[rumith]

Hardly so. Being open or closed doesn't directly contribute to the difficulty of complying to the format, except that only the proprietor of a closed format is likely to be compliant to it. Besides, there are document formats which don't take an eternity to become compatible with.

Re:Impressive

[daveime]

I'm sorry, but I was lead to believe that the tags were meant to convey some useful meaning of what the contents contained ... so if it's now okay by your standard to trim my first offering down to :-

<xml>
<a>
<b>1</b>
</a>
</xml>

then wonderful, we just cut the bloat by a whopping 66%. But it now doesn't convey any useful meaning, thus defeating the whole point don't you think ?

Re:Impressive

[rumith]

You have misunderstood me: it's 500 bytes of document's markup per error. So if we suppose that you are right, then Microsoft reaches an astonishing one error per 1.152 bits of useful document information. :)

Re:Impressive

[Yvan256]

I'm not saying there is any correlation, I'm saying that maybe that's what Microsoft is attempting to convey to the general public, with their push for OOXML as being "open" and their failure to comply with their own format.

Re:Impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

122k errors for a 60Mb file results into a remarkable ~500 bytes of markup per error. He said 17mb - but it'd probably grow to 60mb if you saved it as a Word document...

Re:Impressive

[rumith]

Read the original research. It's 17Mb of errors generated while validating a 60Mb document [100Mb if pretty printed]

Re:Impressive

[RAMMS EIN]

Honestly, I'm gravitating towards the conclusion that this is Microsoft giving the finger to the world.

Re:Impressive

[Niten]

It's so that they can, simultaneously:

1. - Convince the PHBs to keep buying Office because "it has an ISO-standard file format", and
2. - Prevent these people from later switching to OpenOffice because "it's not entirely compatible with [Microsoft's buggy, incorrect, but de-facto standard implementation of] OOXML"

In essence, it's so that they can use the two terms "standard" and "de-facto" standard interchangeably, choosing whichever best suits them in any given situation. They get all the marketing benefit of having an "open standard" file format, yet thanks to all the bugs in the #1 implementation of that spec, the OpenOffice folks and others still have to do a lot of reverse-engineering in order to stay compatible, and they must consciously violate the open standard in order to conform to the de-facto standard.

Re:Impressive

[uniquename72]

I don't mean to brag, but in the schema "http:fuckingxml.com", myboolean is actually much longer than that.

Re:Impressive

[Allador]

Note that the 122k errors are for the STRICT version, which does not, and is not intended to, match any current version of MS Office ooxml output.

The transitive version does match Office 2007, and has only a few errors, and nearly all of them a simple on/off where it should be true/false.

It will probably take MS until the next version of Office, or at best a service-pack or two, to get it conformant with the evolution to the original proposal.

So ... MS submitted the original proposal, which was a dump of what the product was producing at the time. ISO then created a new strict version, which removed things like VML that Office currently uses. MS has not released a new version of office since the evolution to the strict version.

Given all that, it should not be a surprise that Office doesnt produce strict conformant output ... it was never designed to, and the strict version didnt even exist at the time.

Re:Impressive

[ChrisFedak]

In (weak) defense of XML, the advantages of human readability generally outweigh the size concern. Especially when you consider how compressible XML is. When space is a greater concern than processing time, many developers take advantage of LZW or another text compression algorithm to minimize space.

There's a fair bit of research in this area, actually. I've seen a bunch of compression algorithms that get decent compression rates, while maintaining the document structure (so that you can find and decompress only the bit of the XML you need at any given time). I thought that was pretty cool.

Re:Impressive

[ChrisFedak]

To clarify a bit. When I say "generally" I mean for the case where XML is chosen as the data format. There are many cases where binary formats are just better.

Re:Impressive

[Chris Mattern]

Given all that, it should not be a surprise that Office doesnt produce strict conformant output ... it was never designed to, and the strict version didnt even exist at the time.

In other words, they just voted vaporware to be an ISO standard. Bill and Steve must be laughing so hard their stomachs ache.

Re:Impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

it's called false positives you stupid jerkoff. or does the truth hurt your little hollow head?

just another moron in a long line of morons around here who think they have insight into anything. go deliver another pizza.

Re:Impressive

[martin-boundary]

But what's their advantage now that their product is shown to be so horribly incompatible?

I don't know what their advantage is, but if I was one of their competitors *cough*Openoffice.Org*cough*, I'd take out a full page ad in the NY Times like Mozilla did a few years ago, and I'd *point out* that MS Office is NOT standards compliant and so is NOT future proof.

Now that the standard actually exists, it ought to be used ... against them :)

Re:Impressive

[Allador]

Maybe.

I certainly hope that MS will choose to keep the office products inline with the ISO standard, at least as a subset (ie, they may add additional things to it, but still be backwards compatible with the ISO OOXML).

But only time will tell. Right now, the ISO strict version of OOXML has moved too fast for MS' relatively slow product release cycle to keep up. Give it a service pack or two, or maybe the next Office version before we'll know for sure.

Re:Impressive

[jesterzog]

While it's hardly unexpected that Office 2007 document format isn't *cough* ISO compliant, 122k errors for a 60Mb file results into a remarkable ~500 bytes of markup per error.

It depends entirely on context and motivations. I don't like what Microsoft appears to have done here, but if you go out intending to make it look really bad, you could simply pick a small bit of the spec that you happen to know Office 2007 doesn't meet, and then ensure that that particular feature is repeated over and over again in your 60MB document.

HTML

[WK2]

It's not a fast-tracked ISO standard, but HTML and CSS have no conforming implementations. I'm not sure, but links might conform to HTML.

Re:HTML

[wicka]

I'm sure early browsers (WorldWideWeb, Mosaic) had fairly accurate implementations of HTML, but it just sort of got out of hand from there. But the problem here is that there is no conforming implementation and there never was.

Re:HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not strictly true. Ambiguities in the specs are handled differently and there's no published DOM level 0 spec. That said I can hand valid xhtml strict to Gecko, WebKit and Presto and it's supported as spec. Likewise for CSS and js, where the spec is ambiguous vendors attempt to be bug compatible.

Microsoft are hopeless and being bug compatible with them would effectively hand them control of the spec. Anybody else see a pattern here?

Re:HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of HTML, it's amazing how many high-profile sites fail validation. For example, I just ran http://www.nytimes.com/ through http://validator.w3.org/ with a result of "Failed validation, 454 Errors." "Something like HTML that browsers can more-or-less read" is not actual HTML. When I redid a local newspaper's site, I did it by hand (in nicely formatted, human-readable HTML) and made sure that every page passed validation before it went live.

Re:HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

but HTML and CSS have no conforming implementations. Not true. Newer versions might not be fully supported by implementations, but old ones are.
It is of course valid criticism wrt. way W3C develops solutions to non-problems (which is what's happening -- over-complicated unnecessary extensions to things like DOM). But doesn't have much relevance to this particular discussion.

Re:HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Amaya supposed to be conforming?

Re:HTML

[pembo13]

And see how well that turned out.

Re:HTML

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

The current HTML specs are trainwrecks for the same reason. That's what HTML 5 is attempting to fix.

Incidentally, the W3C specs are actually called "Recommendations". There's probably a reason for that.

Re:HTML

[RAMMS EIN]

How do you mean? I create lots of validating HTML. And many browsers render it correctly. Or, at least, I think they do. Even if they don't support all the CSS features I use, the page still degrades gracefully, which is a feature of HTML.

OOXML? It wishes it were that good!

Re:HTML

[TheRaven64]

There is no browser that implements 100% of the HTML 4 specification and 100% of CSS2. The fact that you can create pages with the subset that some browsers implement does not detract from this.

This is one of the reasons why the WHAT-WG guys are adopting the IETF approach for HTML 5. They are proposing new features, but they won't make it into the final specification until they have been implemented by at least one browser (or possibly two - I can't remember what they decided in the end).

Re:HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

In that case, the fact that IETF specs are called "Request For Comment (RFC)" doesn't bode well.

Re:HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but web pages are not expected to look standard in every browser. They never were. On the other hand, it is pointless to create a new document standard that so utterly fails at defining what something is supposed to look like its own reference implementation fails horribly.

Re:HTML

[WK2]

Check this out: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.google.com

Google managed to fit 62 errors in their 4-line half-page home page.

On another note, 90% of all pages that claim to be conformant, with the "Valid (X)HMTL Strict/Transitional" button at the bottom of the page, are not conformant. This statistic gathered from personal observation.

Re:HTML

[msuarezalvarez]

IETF's RFCs graduate to be Internet Standards, which are the actual specs.

Re:HTML

[SL Baur]

Yup. Little known fact: this was added during the review process.

<parseOOXML_like_MSOffice2007>
  rest of the document goes here ...
</parseOOXML_like_MSOffice2007>

What 122,000 errors?

Re:HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, ISO HTML is well supported by most web browsers, and has been for a very long time. Some browsers still miss a few things or get things wrong (Internet Explorer, of course).

CSS, on the other hand, wasn't well supported for a while. Most modern browsers exceed the ISO spec, with the exception of IE 7. IE 8 may, or may not.

Re:HTML

[AdamKG]

Okay, help me out here. Do you mean "how well that turned out" in the sense that HTML has been a huge success (you know, what with being the medium that we're using to display our comments right now ...) or in the sense of being a huge disaster?

I mean, I can sympathize with both views. I'm just wondering which one I should sympathize with in the context of your post.

Re:HTML

[RCanine]

Have you forgotten ISO-HTML? You see a lot of implementations of that nowadays.

Re:HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you save your changes (tracked) in HTML?

How do you save a speradsheet in HTML?

What metadata do you use to make your HTML document searchable in your archive of billions of documents?

How in HTML do you do ACCURATE placement?

How in HTML do you do font embedding? Kern hinting?

HTML would use MathML for maths.

HTML would use SVG and PNG for pictures.

Now when you've done all that, you no longer have HTML 4 or 5. So we have to develope in committee these changes.

Hey, guess what, ODF did exactly this.

Re:HTML

[Corunet]

That's not true. I can -and do- write HTML compliant documents, by hand or using one of many editors, and they validate correctly against its DTD. I think that you meant that there are no user agents that include the full HTML/CSS specification, but that's not the same thing, since if you use a tool -the only one that exists- to create a OOXML file, and can't parse it later according to the spec, it's a dead end.

Pffft. Try ISO IS DYING!!!

[morgan_greywolf]

Pffft. Try ISO is dying. And Netcraft doesn't even need to confirm it.

122,000 errors sure but...

[msh104]

I don't want to destroy the mood that the slashdot editor wanted to create by posting this sensational peace of propaganda. but this is not 122.000 bugs is it? this is a parser generating 122.000 error results. sure it's bad.. but anyone who has ever tried to make code w3c compatible or debug any piece of code will know that just 1 error can result into many many many error results. thus ( despite my will for it to be so ) does not really give you much insight in microsofts compatibility with it's own standard.

Re:122,000 errors sure but...

[pembo13]

I don't know, but the summary I read didn't claim it was 122,000 bugs, said it was 122,000 errors. Unless they changed the summary after you read it.

Re:122,000 errors sure but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know. Even if it is 122 errors (one "real" error for every 1000 the parser coughs up) it would be pretty pathetic that Microsoft's own software doesn't conform with the standard it is pushing.

Re:122,000 errors sure but...

[Seakip18]

I agree on the error count. Accidentally misnaming a constant and using it throughout a moderately complex program could easily pull of that amount of errors.

However, what about the 17MB(MiB??)? Uh, why the heck is the file output so large? TFA didn't say if it was saving a document that said "Hello World!" or some other obscure work. So yeah. That's where I'm really worried/confused. Outputting such a crapload of metadata on a simple document....scary.

Re:122,000 errors sure but...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a good point. This may be deliberate to ensure users have to buy some kind of compatibility module or upgrade, where MS only needs to make a small change to "fix" the compatibility issue. Kind of like a EULA for something you already purchased, which implies individual ownership.... that's another issue.

Re:122,000 errors sure but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...anyone who has ever tried to make code w3c compatible or debug any piece of code will know that just 1 error can result into many many many error results.

"Anyone"? This is Microsoft's *own* software. They wrote the "standard" and Office 2007 is pretty much the closest thing to a reference implementation now.

122,000 errors is insane. And I don't recall anyone saying anything about each error representing a bug, you said that.

I hope to God that you are on Microsoft's payroll, otherwise this is just too pathetic.

Re:122,000 errors sure but...

[onefriedrice]

Huh? Common sense? What are you doing here? Can't you see we're busy bashing Microsoft now?

As bad as it may seem...

[HetMes]

... it's actually worse. We're all agreeing here, it's who comes up with the most ludicrous comparison or the most disturbing details about the case what counts. So, the question is: What can any of us do about this?

You're doubly missing the point

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Developing a standard without having a working example is very foolish. Stuff that looks cool in a standard often does not work out well in real life (theory != practice). Technically, it is far better to survey the landscape for things that work well and standardise those. There are problems with this approach: the companies that have implemented the winning standards often have a competitive advantage,lobbying can wreck the process and the standards might be burdened with patents (and standards users need to pay royalties to the patent holders).

For one example where this has worked well, consider vehicle networking. Bosch invented/designed the Control Area Network (CAN). This was standardised by SAE as part of the in vehicle networking specification. ISO then just adopted the SAE stuff and extended it in some new areas. The stuff all works well and is based on proven technology (ie. the technology existed before the standards).

Re:You're doubly missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."

Re:You're doubly missing the point

[bjourne]

Sometimes it is, sometimes it is not. C99 was a standard long before there were any complaint implementations, same thing with CSS2 and 3. Not to mention Ada 83 which was specified a decade before there was an implementation because the spec designers didn't understand how hard the language they wrote was to parse. Or the different dialects of SQL, some which were standardized two decades ago but there is still no implementation working as specified in the standard. Or all the RFC:s for different protocols, many (maybe most) which has no complete implementation.

The question in the summary is a red herring, there are hundreds of rushed through ISO standards with no conforming implementations. OOXML is not alone in that regard. That is not to say that it is a good way of developing specifications, it isn't. JCP has a better alternative. The spec lead has to release a reference implementation along with a sufficient test suite with their spec. That is the price they have to pay to push their technology into the J2ME platform. It reduces the competetive advantage they gain by having their cool stuff standardized.

Similarily, if Microsoft had to release a free reference implementation and a test suite along with OOXML I don't think anyone would have complained one bit about the spec.

down with mebibytes!

[jollyreaper]

you get a 17 MiB file This whole mebibyte thing seems like an April Fool's prank that's been carried on for too many years. I can't believe people are actually using it now.

Re:down with mebibytes!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather have a standard Mebibyte than a Megabyte that can be interpreted into 3 different values.

Re:down with mebibytes!

[Gat0r30y]

17 MiB Apparently it was enough to confuse 6.2 million hard drive customers forcing Seagate to offer them a refund or free backup and recovery software. When things get that litigious over base 2 vs. base 10, well, I guess you gotta be careful.

Re:down with mebibytes!

[jedidiah]

Anytime I see this I want to bludgeon the offender with a book on scientific notation.

Re:down with mebibytes!

[vidarh]

So in other words the solution for those of us who hate those ridiculous names is to start using them with 5-6 wildly different definitions to make them more ambiguous... Hmm. good idea.

Re:down with mebibytes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time someone tries to state a file size in MiB, I think to myself, "How large is this file that it compares in size to Will Smith or Tommy Lee Jones?"

Re:down with mebibytes!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe vendors still 1024 instead of 1000.

Re:down with mebibytes!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've said it in job interviews and people thought I had a speech impediment...

Re:down with mebibytes!

[h4rm0ny]

This whole mebibyte thing seems like an April Fool's prank that's been carried on for too many years. I can't believe people are actually using it now.

There is a trait amongst some people that derives enjoyment from being able to correct people. The invention of the 1KB = 1000B definition by hard drive marketing departments appeals greatly to those with this trait as it allows them to pretend to correct a large community of people on something they take for granted (you get bonus points the more people you correct and the more fundamental the thing you say they have wrong). Never mind that there is a practical need for a unit based on powers of 2, no practical need for one based on multiples of 10 (unless you are trying to flog hard drives) and that the entire justification for moving to a 1,000 based system is to make things less confusing for the ignorant (who don't care) at the cost of making things more complex for the knowledgeable.

Re:down with mebibytes!

[Hooya]

> you get a 17 MiB file

shouldn't that be "17 MiB files"? kinda like "17 FBI files"? seriously tho, you may want to not advertise the fact that you know about the MiB. let alone the MiB files. you may get someone show up at your door with the "flashy thingy".

Re:down with mebibytes!

[Nazlfrag]

And I'd rather pierce my eardrums with hot skewers and cleave my tongue from my mouth than ever pronounce that monstrosity of a so-called convention that disrespects and denigrates the sacred traditions of our most holy forebears.

Re:down with mebibytes!

[jollyreaper]

I've been downodded to a 2. The mebibyte mafia is after me!

Microsofts Press Release

[Arreez]

Straight from Microsoft: "Hey......it's better than 122,001 errors"

I Remember When...

[Nom du Keyboard]

I remember when back in the good old days of the IBM EGA (640x350 6-bit color) adapter, when semi-clone cards were made they were all rounded up and tested against the IBM "standard". The IBM card had a couple flaws at the time, two of the bottom scan lines were interchanged, and it interfered with the computer's (IBM PC) ability to Warm Boot. Each card was given a percentage rating of how well it compared to the IBM Standard, and comments on whether or not the bugs in the original were fixed, or kept for compatibility reasons. Also, for less money, all of the clone cards came with the maximum 256KB of memory, while the IBM EGA only had 64KB standard, with the rest able to be added through a daughter card.

What most made me smile was that the IBM EGA card was included in the matrix of results, showing a rating of 100% compatibility with itself.

Validates better against the TRANSITIONAL spec

[dominator]

Speaking as an OOX implementer, this is pretty bad. But it's not quite as bad as the headline makes it seem - the meat of the story is linked a few blogs deep:

The expectation is therefore that an MS Office 2007 document should be pretty close to valid according to the TRANSITIONAL schema.

Sure enough (again) the result is as expected: relatively few messages (84) are emitted and they are all of the same type.

<m:degHide m:val="on"/> where "val's" values are supposed to be "true|false".

[snip]

Making them conform to the TRANSITIONAL will require less of the same sort of surgery (since they're quite close to conformant as-is)

In other words, if you're validating against the TRANSITIONAL spec, the OOX documents aren't horribly far off. And it's wrong in such a way that's easy to compensate for in code (i.e. check for "true|on" for a truth value). That's a markedly different situation than described by the headline's "'somewhat less' with the transitional OOXML schema" claim.

And in case anyone claims that ODF doesn't have the same sort of problem, I refer you to AbiWord bug 11359/OpenOffice bug 64237. This one is a show-stopper.

Re:Validates better against the TRANSITIONAL spec

[Anonymous Coward]

So they both have bugs - that's hardly the point.
The point is that an unimplemented standard got force fed to the ISO

Re:Validates better against the TRANSITIONAL spec

[aug24]

in case anyone claims that ODF doesn't have the same sort of problem

FFS, ODF isn't a fast-track ('multiply implemented and widespread') standard. It's perfectly acceptable for a proposed standard to be ahead of current implementations - it's only proposed after all. Implementations should be expect to be playing catch-up.

OOXML on the other hand is claimed to be already implemented and widespread and thus eligible for fast track. So it is a big deal if it turns out it isn't. Not to mention that you're selectively pointing out that the transitional version nearly works, blithely ignoring the fact (in the same blog) that strict is well fucked. So the strict version of the 'standard' should be thrown out even harder that then the transitional.

I'm beginning to wonder if this concept is just too hard to grasp for many slashdotters or if there're just too many people drinking Norway brand Kool-aid.

Justin.

Re:Validates better against the TRANSITIONAL spec

[Anonymous Coward]

And in case anyone claims that ODF doesn't have the same sort of problem, I refer you to AbiWord bug 11359 [abisource.com]/OpenOffice bug 64237 [openoffice.org]. This one is a show-stopper.

The bug isn't a "show-stopper" for two reasons. First, software other than Open Office can simply change any explicit "true" value for text:display to "hidden" if the document was emitted by Open Office. As for saving documents for use by Open Office, the AbiWord page you linked to suggests a partial workaround (by not emitting 'text:display="true"', which is the default). In any case, how does this show that AbiWord isn't compliant? The "bug" report is for compatibility with Open Office, not ODF.

However, all this misses a vital point. OOXML was supposed to be a specification of an EXISTING file format, and the primary focus of OOXML was supposed to be backwards compatibility. What's the use of such a specification if it doesn't describe anyone's file format and fails to support backwards compatibility? The spec falls short of it's primary expressed reason for existing.

What makes this even worse is that vendors will still have to support the actual Microsoft Office 2007 format regardless of the specification, and Microsoft offers absolutely no patent protection in that regard, since it's own format is non-compliant and thus not covered by its own patent covenant. Thus, OOXML is not only massive and poorly written, but it's also useless.

Re:Validates better against the TRANSITIONAL spec

[dominator]

FFS, I'm just pointing out an error in the headline, as it seems that the submitter is intentionally trying to spread misinformation. There's enough wrong with OOXML and how Microsoft's behaved themselves without having to make shit up and distort the facts. You've got 'em dead to rights without needing to distort the truth...

Re:Validates better against the TRANSITIONAL spec

[dominator]

First, software other than Open Office can simply change any explicit "true" value for text:display to "hidden" if the document was emitted by Open Office.

The problem is that software other than OpenOffice.org generates the documents, and then OpenOffice.org (the canonical implementation of ODF) opens them. There appears to be data-loss, but in fact, it's an OpenOffice.org bug. But your suggestion (at best) works until OpenOffice.org 3.0 is released, in which case, application vendors have to go back to following the ODF standard again.

But I wonder why it's ok for application vendors to implement "quirks" to work around OpenOffice.org ODF bugs, but not ok to work around OOXML quirks. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

As for saving documents for use by Open Office, the AbiWord page you linked to suggests a partial workaround (by not emitting 'text:display="true"', which is the default). In any case, how does this show that AbiWord isn't compliant? The "bug" report is for compatibility with Open Office, not ODF.

The fact that there is, for some set of documents, a work-around is irrelevant to my point. The bug report is not showing that AbiWord isn't compliant with ODF. It's showing that OpenOffice.org isn't compliant with the ODF standard. This story is about Microsoft Office generated documents not being compliant with the OOXML standard, and that being intrinsically "bad".

What makes this even worse is that vendors will still have to support the actual Microsoft Office 2007 format regardless of the specification, and Microsoft offers absolutely no patent protection in that regard, since it's own format is non-compliant and thus not covered by its own patent covenant.

If you think that MSFT is going to sue you for implementing a few quirks (because the documents they've generated differ from the actual OOXML standard), I've got a bridge to sell you...

Thus, OOXML is not only massive and poorly written, but it's also useless

That's quite a leap. ODF is massive too, and I contest your point that the OOXML spec is poorly written. But these points alone do not make the format useless. The measure of usefulness is how well the format describes your data and ultimately how many people adopt it by authoring documents using the format. The market will decide that, not you.

Re:Validates better against the TRANSITIONAL spec

[Anonymous Coward]

And in case anyone claims that ODF doesn't have the same sort of problem, I refer you to AbiWord bug 11359 [abisource.com]/OpenOffice bug 64237 [openoffice.org]. This one is a show-stopper.

Except that the ODF specification is valid and self-contained, so there *is* a way to implement it correctly.

Which is not the case for OOXML.

Re:Validates better against the TRANSITIONAL spec

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that software other than OpenOffice.org generates the documents, and then OpenOffice.org (the canonical implementation of ODF) opens them. There appears to be data-loss, but in fact, it's an OpenOffice.org bug. But your suggestion (at best) works until OpenOffice.org 3.0 is released, in which case, application vendors have to go back to following the ODF standard again.

Not if they check the version number, which is supposed to be included in the element per the ODF 1.1 spec, Section 3.1.1:

"The element contains a string that identifies the application or tool that was used to create or last modify the XML document. This string should match the definition for user-agents in the HTTP protocol a specified in section 14.43 of [RFC2616]. The generator string should allow product versions to differ between all released versions of a user agent, for instance by including build ids or patch level information.

"Conforming applications may use the generator string to work around bugs that exist or existed in certain applications, but shall not deliberately implement a different behavior depending on a certain generator string."

The fact that there is, for some set of documents, a work-around is irrelevant to my point. The bug report is not showing that AbiWord isn't compliant with ODF. It's showing that OpenOffice.org isn't compliant with the ODF standard. This story is about Microsoft Office generated documents not being compliant with the OOXML standard, and that being intrinsically "bad".

You're comparing apples to oranges. ODF doesn't have the explicit written objective of being compatible with existing Microsoft content. OOXML does. Thus, non-conformance by Microsoft means that OOXML has failed to achieve an objective for which it was specifically created. The same cannot be said for ODF, which was from the beginning intended as a vendor-neutral format to be implemented after it was specified.

But I wonder why it's ok for application vendors to implement "quirks" to work around OpenOffice.org ODF bugs, but not ok to work around OOXML quirks. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

See my previous response. Not only is it within the ODF spec to allow vendors to provide workarounds for the bugs of other vendors, but no one ever claimed that ODF was a documentation of preexisting content.

If you think that MSFT is going to sue you for implementing a few quirks (because the documents they've generated differ from the actual OOXML standard), I've got a bridge to sell you...

Well, let's see. First, you'd need to know what the differences are between OOXML and the actual Office 2007 format, and because Microsoft is likely not going to document those differences, you'll have to reverse engineer Office 2007 in violation of the EULA. Then you'd have to implement both OOXML and the documented differences, and do so with sufficient quality that it doesn't drive your customers screaming into the open arms of your competitors. Oh, and you need to finish implementing your support before Microsoft comes out with the next version of Office and makes it obsolete.

So, I guess you're right. Microsoft will never bother to sue anyone because the only people who can get far enough with it to be a threat to Microsoft are companies that have the necessary legal, financial and patent assets to negotiate with Microsoft for the information directly.

That's quite a leap. ODF is massive too[...]

OOXML was about 9 times larger before the BRM changes.

[...] and I contest your point that the OOXML spec is poorly written.

Oh, please! You're talking about a spec doesn't even use RFC2119, which is part of pretty much every W3C spec in existence, inc

Agree...

[Anonymous Coward]

... I know more standards that have no conforming implementation, besides the above ones. There must be hundreds of them out there. A standard is a piece of theory, something someone can pickup and implement - it never dictates an implementation.

business as usual

[wizardforce]

It would be ironic if it were not completely expected. I think it would be interesting to see M$ try to spin this one, that at least one of two things must be true: 1) OOXML sucks 2) their software sucks because it can't even follow a standard they themselves created. Probably something along the lines of: "the standard is a significant improvement over Office 2007 which we will implement in our new version." or "We tried to make OOXML a great standard but our efforts were thwarted by outside forces" [in other words their new revisions]

122,000 errors...

[simonharvey]

So as an indication of the evilness of OOXML (using the logic of the OP):

20MB of OOXML contain about 122,000 errors: Muhhaaaah!!!

therefore 50 mega bytes of OOXML contain approximately 250,000 errors: ... Muhhaaaahahhha!!!

continuing: 100 mega bytes of OOXML contain approximately 500,000 errors: ... Muhhaaaahahhhaahhhaaahahaaaaaaaha!!!

therefore, 200 mega bytes of OOXML contain approximately 1,000,000 errors: ... Muhhaaaahahhhaahhhaaahahahhhhhhaaaaahahahahahaahaahahaaaaha!!!

... now, this can't be since that's more errors that exist in the entire world.

So no, I don't really think that the reasoning is sound.

Re:122,000 errors...

[Dunbal]

Obligatory: 122,000 errors should be enough for anybody.

Re:122,000 errors...

[Anonymous Coward]

And if not we can always add more later.

Oh for crying out loud!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they don't conform. The version of OOXML used by Office 2007 today is an older version. Microsoft needs to release a patch for Office 2007 that creates documents that are ISO 29500 compliant. If they had released such a patch and the resulting documents were found to be non-conforming then there would be a story here. But as it is, without a patch, Office 2007 can only be expected to create documents that adhere to the version of OOXML that existed when Office 2007 was released back in 2006. Don't forget that ISO 29500 was only accepted as a standard less than a month ago.

Re:Oh for crying out loud!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, you were expecting folks Slashdot to take the time to read and actually analyze the situation, rather than blindly MS-bash?

You must read a different Slashdot.

Re:Oh for crying out loud!

[eof]

Agreed that Office 2007 not conforming to OOXML is not an issue in and of itself. However, what is an issue for many people is that OOXML was fast-tracked for ISO approval without a working reference implementation. This is contrary to what the ISO fast track is supposed to be used for. It is supposed to be a means of getting a standard that is already working internally for an organization out for approval and general adoption. It is a fair argument that this isn't the case for OOXML if there are no working reference implementations.

Re:Oh for crying out loud!

[makomk]

Of course, I bet that if they modified Office to produce conformant output, they'd break the ability to read the documents in non-patched versions of Office that are expecting the older non-conformant format. (In fact, I reckon it's almost a certainty - with the changes that have been made, it's unlikely that existing Office versions will be able to read conformant documents either.) It possibly wasn't wise to add support for it to Office before the standard was finalised.

Re:Oh for crying out loud!

[Jesus_666]

We just use the extension .docx for the legacy format and .docy for the new one. The next revision of the OOXML standard will then use .docz and the one after that .docaa...

hmmm... 122k errors

[SlshSuxs]

After the first error, are the remaining errors meaningful (i.e. false positives)? I believe most errors after the first are false positives relative to the first error.

Re:Does anyone know if Open Office is compliant wi

[Kalriath]

Technically, no. It doesn't have a full implementation of the standard (in fact, nothing has a full implementation).

It is however, quite close.

In other words ....

[PPH]

We have met the enemy and he is us. -- Pogo (Walt Kelly)

Let them know how you feel

[Gm4n]

We've all pretty much agreed that the standardization of OOXML sucks... why not let the ISO know, instead of discussing amongst ourselves?

Up with mebibytes!

[JustinOpinion]

Ha!

Then there are those of us who think the prank is the people who refuse to use it (and who trot out the tired "hard drive manufacturers are stealing my disk space" myth/meme).

Seriously, the one thing we can agree on is that there is often confusion regarding whether someone meant "1000" or "1024" when they used a prefix. The difference in approach between the two camps is:
1. Stick with the status quo (where one tries to guess the convention being used based on context). That is, just accept with the confusion/inaccuracy.
2. Use SI units in the original SI sense (powers of 10) and use new binary prefixes when you really mean it (power of 2). That is, create a convention and adhere to it.

Interesting that in a discussion about standards (and failures thereof) you would argue that a standard meant to reduce confusion is a prank! I agree, by the way, that "mebibyte" sounds kinda silly... but who cares? It gets the job done. ("Quark" was a silly name, but it's now deeply ingrained in science and no one thinks twice about it.)

For what it's worth, many software products now use the binary prefix notation (e.g. Konqueror).

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Seriously, the one thing we can agree on is that there is often confusion regarding whether someone meant "1000" or "1024" when they used a prefix.

Yeah.

I still remember the two-core-box IBM 7094 I once worked on. It had a mode switch to enable the memory extension or disable it for compatibility with old code. The label read "32k" versus "65k". B-b

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[Tony Hoyle]

Confusion? There was no confusion at all until some idiot decided to try to create one. We're just damned lucky no marketing droid has tried to sell 1.1MB memory sticks yet.

Then to call it the 'maybe byte' FFS... that guy must have been on some fairly strong medication.

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[menace3society]

You're forgetting one thing: people have already adapted to the "old" usage. Dictionaries already exist saying that "mega-" can mean a factor of 1048576 units of computer data. If we change the system now, what will not happen is that everything disambiguates itself, and the hard disk companies stop lying to customers. What will happen is that

1) Seagate et al. will continue to market their products in terms of GB and TB.
2) Users will be outraged that their 232GiB hard disk only has 231 or so GiBs of usable space due to formatting, thus leaving the problem unsolved.
3) People will lose good slang abbreviations like Meg and Gig to Kib, Mib, Gib (or Jib), Tib, and Pib, which not only sound stupid but will also be hard to distinguish in normal conversation.
4) PHBs will misuse the binary-only versions as if they were base ten, especially if it catches on that "mebi-" is more than "mega-".
Techie: Hey boss we've got new computers with 100 mebibytes of L1 cache.
PHB: How much is a mebibytes?
Techie: 1048576 bytes.
PHB: Oh, so it's about a million then. Cool.
Next Day
PHB: Hey guys, we shipped nearly 2 mebi-units of dongles this quarter.
Board: What's mebi-units?
PHB: Well, it's.... Proceed into incorrect explanation that convinced Board of Directors that Boss is "with it"
5) As a corollary to 4), people will start using those prefixes to refer to everything in a computer. The new chip is 3.2 GiHz, it draw 25 kiW of power, it weighs 21 Kig, etc.
6) People will always think you are a douchebag.

And that's not even getting into the confusion caused by having two different sets of prefixes for slightly different multipliers, maybe, during the transition.

Ask any Brit: How much is a trillion?

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[hankwang]

Then there are those of us who think the prank is the people who refuse to use it (and who trot out the tired "hard drive manufacturers are stealing my disk space" myth/meme).

There are occasions where the distinction is important, especially when you want to know the exact number for memory allocations or in trade. But here, we were talking about "around 17 million bytes", which is probably rounded from a number between 16.51 and 17.49 M(i)B. Hence the distinction is not relevant here; the number just meant "an awfully big file".

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh. I really kinda wish we'd ignore the 1024 measurements. For hard drives at least I don't believe there's a reason for it any longer. That'd solve the situation with *no* confusion on future products, and no matter what there's going to be confusion on past (and for now present...) products. I'd love it if my next HD were sized at 120*10^9 and be labeled at 120 GB. No need for GiBi at all.

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Then there are those of us who think the prank is the people who refuse to use it (and who trot out the tired "hard drive manufacturers are stealing my disk space" myth/meme).

Last time I talked to someone who as actually confused by the HD vendor math issue was like, a century ago. And anyway, the short form looks gay and the long form sounds gay. (and I mean gay in the queer sense, not the homosexual sense).

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Any IT professional not using the traditional units should be flogged with a gasoline soaked bullwhip for being a damn dirty traitor.

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[kubrick]

Rounding down in both cases from 32768 and 65536? What's wrong with that?

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the standards maker, NIST, decided to contradict years of common usage, so the problem won't go away until people inclined to use "MiB" realized that NIST is wrong, and "MiB" is silly. Numeric bases are all relative, but in the case of computers, base 2 (and its exponents) represent something tangible, so it's a stretch and an inconvenience to pretend you can represent it using base 10, unless you are in marketing. I understand that mega- and kilo- are defined to be powers of 10, but since bytes don't exist in exponents of ten, the commonly used approximation is just fine.

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[Anonymous Coward]

You simply must see the xkcd spin on this if you haven't already...

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[HalAtWork]

Ha! The only ones who 'believe' that are the astroturfers behind the whole conspiracy in the first place!

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[rjstanford]

Also, don't forget rounding. To the million bytes or so, 17MiB == 17MB. So it really gets stupid at that level. Besides, if we really wanted standards, then KB would refer to 1,000 bytes, since K is the SI prefix for "times a thousand."

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[Spatial]

Exactly. Before this mebibyte crap came along I never got confused or wondered what anyone meant when they said "MB." I expected any device that used binary storage to report in binary prefixes, and even my non-technical family expected this.

You see, they don't give a crap about this kind of thing. It isn't worth trying to change. How many mebibytes of RAM have you got installed? This is just confusing rubbish that nobody needs.

You know, that sounds familiar doesn't it? A bit like ODF and OOXML.

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[slimjim8094]

Doesn't bother me. At least I'm not getting shot at by a MiG

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[martin-boundary]

How long will Seagate remain in business? Will they be around in 50 years? How long will the dictionary definition exist? Will English be around in 50 years?

The fact that people right now might be confused because a few companies are misusing some terms is not a good reason to enshrine incorrect usage over the long haul.

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[menace3society]

Yes, people will be speaking English in 50years. At the very least you have to wait for the current crop of Americans to die off.
No, it doesn't matter if Seagate still exists then, because whoever is selling computer storage will do the same thing.
Lastly, it's only become incorrect because people like you showed up and said, "Hey! This is wrong now!" starting in 1999. By contrast, the ANSI and the IEEE made a standard in '91 that said it was right.

So, in summary: there are real bad reasons not to use the new system, and all of the good reasons are spurious. This is a solution desperately in search of a problem.

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[Jonner]

I can't agree more. I'm always amazed that some people think binary prefixes are a bad idea. Of course, they don't reduce confusion overnight, since people have to get used to them. However, I expect the detractors to gradually fade away. Unlike the "standard" system of inches, pounds, and Fahrenheit, the status quo of using the SI prefixes for either powers of ten or two at whim hasn't had very many decades to solidify.

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[10101001 10101001]

The difference in approach between the two camps is:

1. Stick with the status quo (where one tries to guess the convention being used based on context). That is, just accept with the confusion/inaccuracy.

2. Use SI units in the original SI sense (powers of 10) and use new binary prefixes when you really mean it (power of 2). That is, create a convention and adhere to it.

Um, nothing about (2) inherently precludes (1). (1) is about the proper action to do in reading. (2) is about the proper action to do in writing. No amount of (2) will resolve the issue of having to do (1) for all the texts that were written at a time when there was ambiguity. So, (2) is great and all. But, in a practical sense, it'll take decades for (2) to make (1) mostly irrelevant.*

Interesting that in a discussion about standards (and failures thereof) you would argue that a standard meant to reduce confusion is a prank!

It's funny you say that because it *doesn't* reduce confusion for most people. Imagine, if you will, if the group pushing for KB, MB, etc and KiB, MiB, etc to become an ISO standard was HD makers. Then they could simply point to the ISO standard as proof that their "GB" rating wasn't ambiguous. And if flash HDs start taking over, everything being labeled either "GB" or "GiB" will only add to the confusion for most people. That's the sort of confusion MS seems to be pushing for with the whole OOXML thing, when it can be shown that Office 2007's support of OOXML is a different OOXML than the ISO standard OOXML.

The only real difference is, the usurping of kilo and mega by computer folk was done relatively independently without malicious intent**. The fact that it caused ambiguity with SI didn't seem relevant at the time. Of course, by using kilo and mega instead of unique, non-SI names, it's impossible to now remove ambiguity by using two new, unique systems of naming; at least, it's impossible without abandoning the SI scheme, which is unattractive and undersirable.

*I'm not arguing against (2). I'm just pointing out the way you portray the issue as if there were "camps" contending over a point.

**I'm being overly presumptive here, obviously. It's possible that there was a collection of independent malice in usurping the SI naming scheme. And, it's possible that Microsoft's efforts in conflating what Office 2007 supports and what just became an ISO standard was done because they're part of the same project. But, minimally, Microsoft has a lot more control over defining the name of something yet unreleased than a community has the power to undo decades of incorrect/ambiguous usage/naming. This has, obviously, a lot more to do with there being a single source of control and the standard/quasi-implementation yet to be widely adopted or strongly entrenched by a minority over a period of time. So, if there was any malice involved in at least one of the two circumstance, it leans more towards Microsoft being the "at least one".

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[Jesus_666]

As was the guy wh used identical-sounding words for "bit" and "byte" - ask any French!

Sometimes a word doesn't work perfectly in all cultures. Tough. If you don't like it, exterminate all cultures except one.

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[Jesus_666]

There is an easy solution: We stop the binary silliness and go with base-ten computers.

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just feel like trolling on this one:

7) ...
8) PROFIT!!!

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[menace3society]

WIth quantum computing on the rise, we will then have three different sets of multiplies, one for base 2, one for base 4/quantum base 2, and one for base 10. All of them will be mutually misused, leading to a situation which is more ambiguous, not less.

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[NoOneInParticular]

So, quickly, how many bytes to a 1.44 MB floppy?

Re:Up with mebibytes!

[Spatial]

Gee I don't know. Is that mebibytes or megabytes?

I can't tell you how many bytes of RAM I have installed either, or bits for that matter. My point was just that these things typically come in powers of two because that's what the hardware is actually like, and there's no real benefit to abstracting that from people when there's already a common understanding present.

It would be like trying to change broadband speed ratings from megabits per second to megabytes per second; all it makes for is pointless confusion for Joe Shmoe and a debatably more useful system of measurement for gigantic nerds such as ourselves. Most people have no real comprehension of what the terms even mean, but they can imagine the relative difference having experienced the use of a certain connection speed. The same applies with storage.

Curiousity

[Richard.g.k]

Why is it that microsofts format should conform to OOXML's test?

If it works suitably for microsofts purposes, why doesnt OOXML figure out how to be compatible with it if they want compatibility so bad?

I fail to see why people constantly rag on microsoft for not opening source/making every single product of theirs 100% compatible with open source.

Microsoft is a for profit business...there is not really any incentive for them to *spend money* to make it easier for people to move away from their office suite...

I cant stand the whiney open source people who seem to think that just because they want to do something one way that closed-source companies should adapt their business practices to meet them.

I dont really know a huge deal about the document formatting deal, but what i do know is that I've never had any problem with MS office in the years i've used it for everything from school, to work , to personal projects, so why should they change it to meet someone elses standards now?

Re:Curiousity

[Richard.g.k]

er...it seems i really have no clue what im talking about with this. What i'm trying to say is, if office plays fine with itself, why dont open-source developers conform to it, instead of expecting a for-profit company to pay to make themselves compatible with the competition

Re:Curiousity

[Feyr]

microsoft was more than happy to play that game,
until some governments stepped in and said any documents submitted to them in the coming years has to be an open standard.

so they bought their way to one and voila. their documents still dont conform in practice, but in theory it's an open standard

Re:Curiousity

[Fast Thick Pants]

You've fallen victim to Microsoft's water-muddying strategy -- They gave their new file spec the ridiculous name of "Office Open XML" (abbreviated OOXML) just so it would be conflated with the OpenOffice.org's software and file formats.

So this is not a case of a third-party compliance test like the Acid tests for web browsers; this is Microsoft failing to conform to their own standard.

Re:Curiousity

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, er, patent encumbered and poorly documented?

Re:Curiousity

[MightyMartian]

Who the hell said we want Windows or any of its components, or anything MS releases, to be open source? I don't give a rats ass. However, a supposedly "open" standard should be implementable by anyone with technical capability, and that ought to include the company that developed the standard.

It's pretty clear that you have no idea what any of this is about. I don't know if I'll go as far as to you call you a shill, you seem to ignorant for even that.

Re:Curiousity

[MightyMartian]

And that's what's been going on. However, a lot of governments and other organizations are now realizing that leveraging all that data they've been gathering for the better part of two decades on a closed, proprietary standard could lead to disaster. That's the whole point of trying to get an internationally recognized open standard that anyone can implement. ODF is supposed to fulfill the function of a published, implementable office document standard so that, theoritically, in 2100AD, when someone needs to open a document created in 2010, it's in a openly available format that, at the very worst, someone has to reimplement, but at least has clear, concise documentation that isn't thousands of pages long and doesn't include references to proprietary standards.

The problem with that is that an open document format standard is a direct threat to Microsoft's near-monopoly in the office app department. If anyone can implement a document format that's cross-compatible, then they can easily implement a competitor to Office, and if they decide to undercut Office or (as with OO.org) give the damn thing away, then Microsoft's monopoly is one breath from collapse, and believe me, if Microsoft loses Office, they're in serious, serious trouble within five years. So, OOXML, a "standard" that not even Microsoft can implement, is pushed through the ISO using all sorts of peculiar and ultimately nefarious methods now means Microsoft and its partners can go around telling Small Town, USA that Office saves in an ISO standard, but in reality, the poor bastard in 2100AD who needs to open this file is going to be spending many months trying to figure out this monster, which is in direct violation of the whole notion of an open standard.

That you have no problems is irrelevant. That's not what the point of an open standard is.

I smell the next fine approaching...

[AlgorithMan]

so the ooxml specification they give to their competitors is extremely different from what mso2k7 reads/writes..... this means they intentionally give wrong interface-specifications to their competitors... I don't know how it is with you, but i smell the next fine > $1,000,000,000 by the EU approaching...

Re:I smell the next fine approaching...

[TheRaven64]

I hope they don't fine them over this. It would be far better for the EU to simply issue a directive saying EU member governments and government agencies may not use any Microsoft file format by 2010. If Microsoft want to then fully support ODF in their office suite, MPEG-4 in their media tools, and so on then they can continue to compete for government contracts. If not, they can watch sales in Europe drop to nothing as documents in MS-incompatible formats start trickling out of governments, through government contractors and down into homes.

Re:I smell the next fine approaching...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I hope they don't fine them over this. It would be far better for the EU to simply issue a directive saying EU member governments and government agencies may not use any Microsoft file format by 2010.

You make it seem like it is either or. The EU should for reasons of pure self interest move to ODF for all government use. That aside, the EU should still take action against this as an antitrust abuse as well. Just because the stops using MS's formats doesn't mean they should also give them a pass on breaking the law. They should be forced to comply with providing complete interoperability with competitors or pay fines for refusing to comply. Remember, while the EU government(s) should be preventing themselves from being locked in and avoiding business deals with criminals, they also need to protect other companies from suffering from MS's criminal actions with regard to all the other software contracts in the EU.

Re:Does anyone know if Open Office is compliant wi

[notaprguy]

So then I'd ask what does it mean to be "quite close?" I don't expect you to have all the details but I always wonder if /. postings like the parent slamming MSFT could just as easily be relabled. In this case, the headling might have been: OpenOffice fails ODF Test with 3224 Errors

Consider this.

[MBC1977]

Hmmm, ok I'll look at it a slightly different way. If MS own application cannot meet MS's OOXML standard, then perhaps (going out on a limb here), just perhaps this is a viable standard. Before, penguins and chairs come my way here me out. We have a *cough* standard, that right now, nobody is meeting. So in other words, all parties involved (MS and everyone else) at least on the application side, are on equal footing. Has anyone tried (painful as it might sound) to write an application (or file format) that writes to MS (and now ISO's) standard? I mean a standard can't be a standard (at least as I see it) if nobody is using it (or attempting to).

I mean it wouldn't hurt to attempt make a bridge here, would it?

A campaign is needed here

[ivoras]

People need to be aware of this. So:

1. Find a reputable company to verify these results
2. Start a campaign about it - publish whole-page ads in newspaper like Firefox did it some time ago, atc.

If it stays "news for the geeks", nothing will come from it.

haha

[apodyopsis]

"What Microsoft really wanted was that ISO stamp of approval to use as a marketing tool. And just like your mother told you, when they get what they want and have their way with you, they're probably not gonna call you in the morning."

hahaha. Tim Bray has a nice way with words.

nobody in the know is in the least surprised by this, I can just see those jizz swizzling bollock juggling idiots at the ISO now on the phone to MS "..but you promised you'd fix it!".."we put our credibility on the line..".. No sympathy, I'm still irate about the whole thing.

seriously though, this is Pyrrhic victory for MS - "the firm that cannot even meet their own standard".

uhhhhh

[niteice]

Most of the problems reportedly relate to the serialization/deserialization code.

um

Isn't that what file formats do?

Re:uhhhhh

[Richard.g.k]

i thought file formats served as a means to get a bunch of grumpy lawyers and talking heads to argue about things and collect a paycheck, while really not caring what the consumer thinks

Referenced article promotes a bogosity.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The referenced article claims that "the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power", which is bogus.

The English had a major sea trading infrastructure, at a time when improvements in clocks finally made accurate determination of longitude by celestial navigation practical for trans-Atlantic voyages.

They established an observatory at a major port (Grenwich) to provide a time-hack for ships in port (both military and commercial) to set their clocks, and distributed navigational charts with that observatory's latitude as the basis for the coordinate system (thus simplifying navigational calculations).

This quickly became the defacto standard on a voluntary basis among commercial shipping, along with the cities that grew up around major seaports (with multiples-of-an-hour offsets to approximate local noon - typically multiples of an hour, sometimes of a half- or quarter-hour), just as the coordinate system became the standard for shoreline mapping in other locations (to simplify navigation near shores by ships using the Grenwich meridian for their ocean charts). Then when railroads drove time standardization it spread from the seaport cities to inland locations.

Of course the empire's military and government used it internally. But the rest of the world adopted it voluntarily.

Re:Referenced article promotes a bogosity.

[Trails]

It was also encouraged in some part by the fact that the first clock which worked reliably on a ship, which you refer to, was invented by the Englishman John Harrison. This book, which discusses the inventor and his invention, is quite interesting and worth a read.

The original mean went through Paris, but shifted to Greenwich as a result of the aforementioned invention, and the naval political pull the British earned as a result.

That is an improvement

[gnutoo]

and only someone so perversely flexible will ever be able to confrom to M$XML. The Gnome foundation might get there one day but the ISO spec is doomed to a life of disrespect, much like rich text format before it. There's really no point in trying because the Soft is out of gas.

Re:That is an improvement

[inTheLoo]

Yeah, ODF is going to win this one. All M$ bought from the ISO was a black eye for themselves. None of it's going to magically make M$ Office less of a suck on IT budgets. If M$ was serious about being Open they would have used that other ISO standard, ODF and competed on a level playing field. This sort of proves they can't do that.

Re:That is an improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually right. Besides having to be ISO standards, most governments require document storing formats to have implementations in multiple operating systems.
Unless MS uses that patent agreement with Novell to have them offer a linux implementation of the standard and keeping it locked from other implementations with their patents.
Well, then, I'd like to change my comment to you're worng, and MS got us all cornered.

Re:That is an improvement

[Tony Hoyle]

Do ya think?

Governments started demanding documents in open formats.. that threatened their monopoly, so they paid to get their XML schema called one.. now governments go back to buying exclusively Office again... MS Wins.

End users don't give a shit about open. Governments do but only on paper.. once it comes down to the buying decision all they need is a checkmark on a list. It doesn't actually have to mean anything (cf. Posix compatibility in NT4.. damned near useless but it was a requirement at the time).

Re:That is an improvement

[inTheLoo]

The point of the article is that there are no conforming implementations. There never will be a conforming implementation and everyone knows it.

Re:That is an improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Talking to yourself with 3 sock puppet accounts, one after the other in some sort of agreement?! twitter, you've gone fucking nuts.

Re:That is an improvement

[willyhill]

Anyone posting on this thread should be aware that "inTheLoo", "gnutoo" and "westbake" are sockpuppet accounts of the person who posted the original troll comment, twitter.

twitter now has six known accounts on Slashdot, three of which have negative or near-zero karma.

Re:That is an improvement

[Allador]

I wouldnt agree with your statement.

The point of the article is that MS Office isnt conformant to the STRICT version. This shouldnt come as a surprise, as the change from the original OOXML to the strict version happened, but no new versions of MS Office have been released. The best thing anyone could reasonably expect of a company is that they would update it in the next Office 2007 service pack.

Office comes in a 2-4 year release cycle, and the change in ISO from the transitional version to the strict version happened after Office 2007 SP1 was already done.

How could MS have known in advance the changes that would happen to the standard? They cant see into the future.

Dont forget here that the STRICT version is NOT representative of what any version of office produces. We already knew that.

It was an ISO evolution of the submitted version (the transitional one). The vendor would need some time and a release cycle to adapt their products to it.

What _will_ be interesting is how/when/if MS does conform to the strict format.

On the other hand, the MS Word conformance to the transitional format seems reasonable. TFA only noted one problem, where an attribute value was using on/off rather than true/false. This is minor and easily fixed and/or recorded as a known issue.

Re:That is an improvement

[initialE]

Now that the specification for OOXML is out, and Office 2007 has no implementation, you are not allowed to fill in the checkmark on the list. In fact, if you want a solution now, the only available choice is ODF. Until the next Office service pack, of course.

Re:That is an improvement

[jimicus]

Now that the specification for OOXML is out, and Office 2007 has no implementation, you are not allowed to fill in the checkmark on the list. In fact, if you want a solution now, the only available choice is ODF. Until the next Office service pack, of course. Agreements for government departments - the main target for such standards - don't get done and dusted overnight.

A few sweet words from an MS salesweasel ("The next service pack, due out RSN will solve that issue, so you may as well tick it. Also, you won't have to retrain all your staff in a totally different office suite [ha ha] - imagine how much time, effort and money that will save!") should solve that issue.

Re:That is an improvement

[LordVader717]

Most government offices wouldn't go into a discussion about the availability or usability of implementations. For them "ISO Standard" will be enough to be able to ignore any objections.

Re:That is an improvement

[Douglas Goodall]

I am totally laughing about this. You see I am a software engineer and for many years I have written software that conforms to the specification. I prefer specifications that are implementable. But once I agree to implement, a deal is a deal. Now Microsoft will have to show us whether they have what it takes to eat their own dogfood.

Re:That is an improvement

[IrquiM]

There will be!

OO will implement it as good as it gets, which for MS, must be a huge blow, because the competitor will be the first to proper implement their standard.

Re:That is an improvement

[xSauronx]

You did that wrong. Let's try it again, starting with "I'm a software engineer and I'm really getting a kick out of these replies..."

Action!

Re:That is an improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I be Twitter, too? (He's such a nice crowd.)
In all seriousness, maybe we could inspire him to make hundreds of sockpuppets, then suddenly stop posting. You know, just to see how long it would take him to notice.

Re:That is an improvement

[Muad'Dave]

They cant see into the future.

No, but they can buy it.

ODF wasn't fast-tracked

[Xtifr]

Does anyone know if Open Office is compliant with the Open Document Format? Just curious. I don't know, but if none of the multiple (big difference already) vendors behind ODF haven't implemented it properly yet, then that just means that it shouldn't have been on the fast-track.

Oh wait! It wasn't!

The fast-track is for de-facto standards which are already so widespread (i.e. supported by multiple vendors) and consistent that there's little point in trying to push a divergent standard out, even though a divergent standard might be better. Something like TCP/IP would be a good example of the sort of thing where the fast track might be appropriate. ODF wasn't fast-tracked, so the standards committee came up with the best standard, irrespective of what might actually be out there in the wild. Now it's up to the vendors to catch up. That's the usual way this is done (i.e. the C++ standard, where most vendors took a few years to catch up, or the C standard where most vendors took a few months to catch up, and MS took a few years).

Of course, if MSOOXML had gone through the regular track, it probably would have taken years to finish (since it's so large, complex, and poorly defined), and MS couldn't afford to wait. So instead they bought themselves a standards committee or twelve.

Re:ODF wasn't fast-tracked

[m50d]

or the C standard where most vendors took a few months to catch up, and MS took a few years

A few months? I make it 9 years and counting, no?

Re:ODF wasn't fast-tracked

[mingot]

Wrong. ODF was fast tracked.

Re:ODF wasn't fast-tracked

[mpe]

Of course, if MSOOXML had gone through the regular track, it probably would have taken years to finish (since it's so large, complex, and poorly defined), and MS couldn't afford to wait.

Assuming it actually did finish.

So instead they bought themselves a standards committee or twelve.

Did they also pick the time of the vote...

Do as I embrace...

[greg_barton]

...not as I extend!

Re:Does anyone know if Open Office is compliant wi

[calebt3]

Doesn't OOo use ODF 1.1 or 1.2 while the ISO has approved only ODF 1.0?

Re:Does anyone know if Open Office is compliant wi

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Is your mom compliant with the Open Dick Format? Such language. Do you kiss your mother with those fingers?

What it the idea behind the "fast track" process?

[walterbyrd]

I thought the idea behind the fast-track was a have less-fussy way of ratifying standards, when those standards were already widely used.

If that is correct, then how does the MSOOXML standard qualify? This is a "standard" that is used by absolutely nobody, not even the creator of the standard uses this standard.

Do I not understand the idea behind the fast-track process?

Absolutely

[g2devi]

> Obligatory: 122,000 errors should be enough for anybody.

Actually, it's more than enough. I have no idea how to handle even a 100th of them. Thanks the problem.

This is a good thing, really think about it...

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, I am a Microsoft employee. I do not work in Office and I have never worked in Office. I don't know anything about this stuff that isn't publically available.

I don't know about you guys, but I would be seriously concerned if Word 2007 DID pass the new OOXML spec with flying colors. Remember that the current revision of the spec is around 15 months newer than Word 2007 is. If it did pass with no errors, that would sound to me like all the harsh criticism and feedback from ISO members had no effect on the spec itself.

Re:ISO to fast track mecca time?

[Anonymous Coward]

> But the movement is not without its critics, who say that the notion that modern science was revealed in the Koran confuses spiritual truth, which is constant, and empirical truth, which depends on the state of science at any given point in time.

These dolts are as bad as creationists, and we get this weasely last paragraph.

Yes, I think so.

[inTheLoo]

ODF is the tip of a very big iceberg. It's an important and public facing tip but it is a small part of both government and business wasting money on the upgrade treadmill and all the intentional waste of M$ Office. It's all downhill from here.

Re:Yes, I think so.

[Allador]

What is this 'upgrade treadmill' you're referring to?

Most .gov orgs at least here in the US that I've seen are using everything from Office 97 to Office 2003, but none are using Office 2007.

That suggests to me that there is no 'forced upgrade' or 'upgrade treadmill'.

What is it that you're seeing that indicates otherwise to you?

Re:Yes, I think so.

[CustomDesigned]

That suggests to me that there is no 'forced upgrade' or 'upgrade treadmill'.

What is it that you're seeing that indicates otherwise to you?

People keep emailing me files with 'docx' extension, and expect me to be able to read them.

Re:Yes, I think so.

[Allador]

Easy solution.

1. Tell them to send you .doc or .pdf.

or

2. Install the free, simple, easy to install compat pack from MS.

Nothing you've said here translates into MS forcing you to upgrade. In fact they've given you tools that make it easy and simple to NOT upgrade, and made them free to download.

This is not to suggest that MS doesnt WANT you to upgrade, of course they do. But many, many businesses and orgs are still running quite successfully on older versions of MS Office.

Re:Yes, I think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

The compat. pack wont install on my BeOS desktop, what am I doing wrong?

Re:Yes, I think so.

[LordVader717]

I think everyone here will be ble to tel you a personal nightmare story about office document compatability.
There may be plugins and converters etc. , but usually they're not very practical to use, especially if you're working with them all day. And most worrying is tht you never can be certain whether what you saved to a file will appear the same on the screen of the person you sent it to.
Finally, telling clients how to save they're documents, causing delay and frustration is definitely not a good idea.
From a business perspective the above arguments justify spending a few hundred dollars every three years to avoid problems.
Most people do actually buy new versions of Office to maintain compatibiliy, or at least it's very high on the list of reasons for upgrding. For something as simple as a text document, that's inexcusable.

Re:Yes, I think so.

[jimicus]

That suggests to me that there is no 'forced upgrade' or 'upgrade treadmill'.

What is it that you're seeing that indicates otherwise to you? There's at least two upgrades I can see right away.

The demand that all documents be stored in a standard format immediately forces the upgrade to Office 2007. Once the next version of Office comes out (presumably with support for ISO OOXML Strict), we can reasonably assume that's another forced upgrade right away.

Even if the second forced upgrade never happens, it means that over time thousands of government documents will be converted to a format for which no half-decent, non-patent-infringing Free implementation can ever exist. The same probably can't be said for earlier Office file formats.

Re:Yes, I think so.

[Knuckles]

Of course the compat pack only covers features that are shared between the different Office versions. If someone sends you an *.xlsm file with 66,000 rows, you are out of luck even with the compat pack.

Re:Yes, I think so.

[szo]

I wish I could moderate this as "there is a whole world outside of ms, asshole!" :(

Re:Yes, I think so.

[Allador]

Cant be sure since we're at the max depth /. allows, but I'll assume you're responding to me.

The conversation as it was being had was purely about the MS world. The whole 'what do I do with BeOS' was off-topic from the start. I probably shouldnt have responded to it, as it was a fairly silly troll.

The conversation was about whether there was or was not any such thing as 'forced upgrades' or an 'upgrade treadmill'.

Due to the topic, this necessarily applies only to the 'ms world'.

So yes, we all understand there's a world outside of MS. But within the context of what we were talking about (ie, force upgrades) its scoped to just the MS world, as they're the only ones who buy MS products.

Re:Yes, I think so.

[fm6]

There are consequences for not upgrading. Namely lack of support, problems sharing files with people who have newer versions, and the certainty that you'll have to upgrade anyway (and then have to import your own files, with all the hassle that involves) when your old computer finally dies.

These consequences are real. They don't go away just because people refuse to deal with them. That's why we need a stable, open document format that will always work, and isn't subject to the compulsive, undocumented tweaking MS formats are subject to.

Re:Yes, I think so.

[Allador]

In the real world though not upgrading works well for an awful lot of orgs.

Does it have a cost, of course! Is it less of a cost than upgrading to the newer versions? For many orgs it must be, because thats the choice they make.

Note also that most businesses wouldnt have to upgrade when their computers die, as they dont get office with their computer, so that doesnt end up being a real issue in the real world, and only affects home users and the very smallest of businesses.

My point is that people rant and rave and alot of hand waving about the 'forced upgrade' or 'upgrade treadmill', but it doesnt in fact exist.

Many, many orgs are still using Office 2000 or older, and they're doing just fine. Office 2007 has been out for 1.5 years, and the vast majority of orgs arent using it yet.

Just because there is a nonzero cost with not upgrading doesnt mean you're forced. Thats just life, where everything has a cost, even if its only an opportunity cost. There is no free lunch though.

Even if everyone used OO with ODF, there's a cost to upgrade to newer versions of OO (ie, labor, management, etc). So I guarantee you that even in that scenario many orgs would be several versions behind, and suffering the same costs as you describe.

In the real world out there it just doesnt end up as painful as you describe. It's just another cost/benefit analysis and choice that all businesses end up having to make about everything.

Microsot Apologist says what?

[erroneus]

You know, in all of these anti-Microsoft discussions, I don't think I have read much commentary saying "everyone does this! why should Microsoft take all the heat for it?" or "this is just how business is done! This is not news." types of comments? I may have missed them though. Still it would be interesting to know whether or not Microsoft is the first and only one to have pulled this type of stunt with ISO? Is it actually common and we only noticed because it was Microsoft doing it?

well...

[sentientbrendan]

>How many other fast-tracked ISO standards have no conforming implementations?

C++?

Try out the "export" keyword next time you write any C++.

Re:well...

[david_thornley]

C++ wasn't fast-tracked.

Re:well...

[reynaert]

Comeau C++ + Dinkumware is pretty damn close to standard C++. It certainly supports "export".

They're standard...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ridiculous or not, they did eventually get properly standardized to defend the meaning of the prefixes. The original article wrote MB, when it was clearly using MiB in context, so I changed it.

I just thought it would be a bit hypocritical of me to complain about perverting standards if I was using non-standard notation. Yes, the scope and reasoning are FAR different (and there's good reason to think that the HD makers created the confusion to begin with to inflate HD sizes), but still, they have been properly standardized. And I'm not aware of anyone trying to buy that vote.

In other words, I just felt that it was important to try to hold myself to the standards I would hold others to. Even for silly little nits like that.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

Re: Reference your quotation.

[LaminatorX]

"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." ---Mentat Aphorism

At least one other

[ribuck]

How many other fast-tracked ISO standards have no conforming implementations?

ISO 25436 describes a version of the Eiffel programming language that has never been fully implemented. The standard contains lots of "blue-sky" "would-be-nice-to-have" sections which are planned to be implemented in the future.

ECMA gives the document author a lot of control, so things can become ECMA standards that would not become ISO standards. But then the fast track ISO process (for existing ECMA standards) makes it easier for them to become ISO standards.

Re:Does anyone know if Open Office is compliant wi

[dominator]

I'm aware of at least one - see AbiWord bug 11359/OpenOffice bug 64237.

Both AbiWord and OpenOffice.org support hidden text. According to the ODF spec, if you say 'text:display="true"', you're supposed to see the text. However, OpenOffice.org uses "true" to mean "hide the text" and "none" to mean "show the text". Or, the inverse of its correct meaning (or what you'd expect from the CSS && specs). This will supposedly be corrected in OO.o 3.0, which is due out soonish. However, this leaves a problem with a bunch of documents that won't render "as intended" (either by the user or by the ODF spec).

Only 122,000 proprietary extensions

[flyingfsck]

I don't see any problem. Under the standard, proprietary extensions are allowed...

well at least we can say we told you so...

[lindoran]

it's a good thing that we thought this out so no mistakes were made and in the end the product was fair and equitable for everybody involved.... no wait... oh well.

Re:Does anyone know if Open Office is compliant wi

[makomk]

As far as I know, Open Office produces valid ODF documents (with the odd extension for things like spelling and grammar checker options that are application-dependent), but it doesn't necessarily implement 100% of the latest version of the ODF spec. (In fact, IIRC sometimes other word processors add support for new ODF features before it does.) Since ODF is a committee-developed standard not based on what any one word processor does, this really shouldn't be surprising.

Re:What it the idea behind the "fast track" proces

[Anonymous Coward]

Moron, the spec was changed during the BRM. Therefore neither MS Office, nor iWork, nor Gnumeric, nor any other OOXML app supports the ISO version. This isn't rocket science, you disingenuous phony.

You people think you're scoring pr points by pretending to be shocked at this, but you are instead giving the impression that either you're complete idiots or you think that the rest of as are.

And above I see the proposition put forward that if any changes are made to a spec during fast-track process, then it means that the spec shouldn't have been fast-tracked in the first place. The logical conclusion would be that the existence of the BRM procedure should never be undertaken. But the fact that the BRM procedure exists presumes that fast-tracked specs are allowed to change during the BRM.

The fact that the article says that the transitional documents only suffered 84 errors, even though the spec for transitonal documents was also changed during the ISO process, shows that MSO won't need to change much to fully support ISO OOXML transitional documents, and likely won't need much more than that to support non-transitional ISO OOXML documents.

Tell me, once MSO, iWork, Gnumeric, et al release patches to support ISO OOXML, you'll STFU, right?

Really?

[westbake]

I'm twitter because I like a female goat better than a male one? That's one step beyond reality.

Re:Really?

[willyhill]

For someone with a 1.2M+ UIN and a grand total of five posts, you sure are versed in Slashdot lore.

You created this account as a clever variation on westlake, just like your Mactrope troll account was intended to be confused with Macthorpe.

That makes it six sockpuppet accounts so far. To repeat what I've been asking you, how long do you figure this can go on?

quickly, bash microsoft!

[timmarhy]

Because we choose to ignore the fact nothing passes acid3 on the web, including our beloved firefox.

the truth is almost no software passes standards tests, but hey don't let facts get in your way....

Re:quickly, bash microsoft!

[Vexorian]

Dude, did you miss the whole "fast track" part? Err, what do you mean by nothing? That was not true for a while, and quite a ton of geeks do care hence they like webkit. Either way, firefox3 and many other browsers and engines do get more than 69% in that test, not to mention the 98%+ ones, which in comparison to what happened with office and OOXML is quite a great result.

So my question is: Is your question coming from the missing-the-point department?

Re:quickly, bash microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

>Because we choose to ignore the fact
>nothing passes acid3 on the web, including our beloved firefox.
> the truth is almost no software passes standards
> tests, but hey don't let facts get in your way....

That was a piss poor example to compare with. Why? Because your example
demonstrates perfectly what happens when you don't conform to the standard:
a proprietary web browser that does not remotely conform to the published
specs and which forces through its OS monopoly as many web sites to render
half assed html "correctly" on its proprietary web browser. Can you guess
which proprietary browser has warped html content so much and which company
owns that proprietary browser, and what relationship that company has to
the company that forced through its funky OOXML "standard" onto iso? Yeah,
I'm sure you already knew that when you made your posting.

Re:quickly, bash microsoft!

[slimjim8094]

Fail.
1. Some browsers do - at least Safari nightlies, probably Konqueror, and I think Opera nightlies.
2. Acid3 was written to fail on every current browser. Are you seriously going to argue that this standard was ratified, expecting that it would fail on every current product??

Re:quickly, bash microsoft!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Because we choose to ignore the fact nothing passes acid3 on the web, including our beloved firefox.

Actually, Opera and Webkit both do, although not in the production releases just yet. In any case, Acid3 is about testing specific edge cases in javascript. It isn't a standards test so much as a tool for fixing error handling. It is also a damn site different from something MS is trying to get governments to standardize on even though they haven't fully implemented it and there is serious doubt that anyone will be able to do so at all.

Re:What it the idea behind the "fast track" proces

[Xtifr]

In the old days, the fast-track was merely a less-fussy way of ratifying already-widely-used standards. Now it's also a way of ratifying anything that someone is willing to throw enough money at.

Do I not understand the idea behind the fast-track process? You understand part of the idea behind the process. The part you don't understand is the part where the fast track process can be manipulated by corruption and bribery to ensure that a large corporation continues to maximize its profits without concern about what the impact might be on the rest of the world. I have to admit that I wasn't aware of that aspect of ISO before this debacle either, but it's pretty clear now. :)

Facts?

[argent]

Facts? Try this fact: this is not an external standard that Microsoft is supposed to bring their software into line with, this standard was presented by Microsoft as accurately describing what their software actually did. That's the whole reason it was "fast tracked", because it was supposed to be a description of a conforming implementation.

If it's not, then it shouldn't have been "fast tracked", it should have gone through the same process as current HTML standards... you know, the ones Acid3 are testing...

That is, the issue is not whether Office conforms to the standard, but that Microsoft lied about its status.

HLA Simulation Standard was a bad joke

[Anonymous Coward]

> How many other fast-tracked ISO standards have no conforming implementations

This is an IEEE standard which seriously blows. It was supposed to be the new standard for the military to connect their simulators, replacing an old one which mostly worked very well. Some boffins with some well-monied suits convinced the Secretary of Defense to mandate a new standard, which unlike the old open one, their company would take over and design behind closed doors. It was mandated before anyone had implemented it, and when people tried the wheels fell off it. It was poorly speced so different implementations couldn't talk to each other. It was a spaghetti design. It was a joke.

The old standard lived on, and was quietly updated. The old one remains a dead albatross around the DoD's neck that they can't take off because too many careers would be ruined by that. "This albatross is not dead, he's sleeping". Wikipedia used to have an amusing quip (not mine!) saying "DIS is far from dead, although many people wish it would go away".

Re:Does anyone know if Open Office is compliant wi

[Anonymous Coward]

ODF 1.1 documents are valid ODF 1.0 documents.
Where's the problem?

Ubuntu agrees

[Anonymous Coward]

If you choose English as your language, it's impossible to not start the week on Sunday, even though my whole country (and possibly all of the continent, at least most) start it on Monday.

Who'd have known that *language* decides what calendar I must follow?

Then again, the new calendar sure got a lot of bling. Sigh.

Acid

[buchner.johannes]

Someone should write one or two conformity tests, so every time one says "OOXML is nice", one can point to that (failing) test until Microsoft fixes the bugs.

It worked for web standards, why not here too?

Re:Does anyone know if Open Office is compliant wi

[Kalriath]

I've heard elsewhere in this Slashdot discussion that apparently there is a point where OO.o blatantly violates the specification - using the exact opposite value for hidden text as it's meant to. So it's almost valid.

Re:Does anyone know if Open Office is compliant wi

[Kjella]

It certainly didn't when the standard was first out, for example the ODF standard references in the whole MathML standard. It's pretty huge and detailed for being in an office document and neither OpenOffice or KOffice supported it fully (not sure if they 100% do still). Still, ODF wasn't fast tracked and it means a bunch of smart guys come together and agree on how things *should* work best, then they write it up in a standard and all parties try to work towards it. I don't think anyone has a 100% CSS3 implementation either, for example.

Thing is, I haven't heard of anyone else in these discussions, it's just Microsoft and their standard. The standard is full of things that aren't properly resolved and so they'll continue to be that way now that the standard is approved. I've heard the bullshit that ISO will not steer the direction of OOXML but I figure Microsoft will just drop an updated version on their heads from time to time. What threats does ISO have to influence anything? They could revoke the standard, but that just wouldn't happen. They'll just be all talk.

Re:What it the idea behind the "fast track" proces

[walterbyrd]

My, my, aren't we touchy? Tell me, when was the approved standard widely used? Ever?

Was the original standard widely used?

And why did they change the spec during the BRM?

So please explain how OOXML qualified for the fast-track process?

Acid3? WTF? I thought this was about OOXML?

[walterbyrd]

WTF does the acid3 test have to do with any of this?

However firefox does with the acid3 has nothing to do with ISO corruption, does it?

What-Christian?

[tepples]

Up next, we change "Wednesday" to "Threeday", because references to Odin are just far too Euro-centric. That is, assuming we stick with that Judeo-Christian concept about Sunday being the seventh day. You mean "Christian". Judaism has always considered the seventh day to extend from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday.

DUH!!

[Neanderthal Ninny]

So does MS Internet Explorer fails many ISO test. MS wants to create "de facto" standards without a standards body and they have been doing that since the beginning.
However standards bodies are not perfect either, remember the DVD- versus the DVD+ which we had to get either DVD- or DVD+ disk for the proper drive.

I believe that's 17mb of errors

[lullabud]

The way I read the article, the output of the errors alone was 17mb... That's pretty f bad, the errors alone are way bigger than most documents I write.

"17MB (around 122,000) of invalidity messages"

Re:Does anyone know if Open Office is compliant wi

[Anonymous Coward]

how about this one: http://opendocumentfellowship.com/validator

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I dunno about ISO...

[Blakey Rat]

How many other fast-tracked ISO standards have no conforming implementations?

I dunno about ISO, but there are entire economies built around XHTML + CSS, neither of which has a reference implementation.

Re:What kind of BS is that? "Strict Standard?"

[Allador]

You either conform to a standard or you don't. Thats a nice theory but not really practical. ISO OOXML (strict version) was created between MS product releases.

How long should it have taken for MS to release a version that matched ISO OOXML strict? One hour? One day? One year? More?

Companies dont have the magical ability to instantly create a released product the day that the standards group settles on something. Thats just absurd.

A standard that allows non conforming versions is no standard. Standards dont allow or disallow implementations. Thats now how it works. Standards exist. Implementations try to be compliant to them.

According to TFA, Office 2007 OOXML is very conformant to ISO OOXML Transitional. But its not very comformant to ISO OOXML Strict.

This should not be a surprise. For examle, the Strict version removes VML as a vector graphics markup. But MS has a decade or more of investment in VML, and their currently released products use VML. It will take a while for MS to change Office to not use VML (assuming they do choose to).

If it would take 2 to 4 years for M$ to properly implement and document their crappy little standard, it should take 2 to 4 years for people to believe they had a standard worthy of ISO approval. I agree that it shouldnt have been fast tracked. That was a bit of an abomination. But lets be clear that MS didnt create a new standard, and then implement it. They just continued to develop their existing implementation, and documented what they already had. The OOXML is not a fresh creation ... its a documentation of something that has existed and been evolving for 10-15 years.

Standards that come from mature, crufty old de-facto standards (ie, OOXML) are always going to be uglier than standards that were created to be a standard from day one (ie, ODF). Thats just reality. Expecting it to be clean and pretty is not reasonable.

But the world where OOXML and the previous binary .doc .xls, etc formats are documented (ie, the world we're in now) is better than the one we were in before, where none of it was documented.

PS, thank you Twitter for being reasonably coherent and making a post that, littered with the M$ nonsense that it is, at least was a reasonable discussion.

huh?

[sentientbrendan]

What's the difference? What is significant about a standard that no one implements being standardized fast or slow?

Re:huh?

[EvilAlphonso]

Executive summary of the difference between slow tack and fast track: slow track: we just had a brilliant idea and it would be nice if everybody did it this way in the future implementations fast track: the current implementation of the de-facto standard is like this, we now make it an official standard There should not be any such thing as a "fast track standard that has no implementation".

Re:huh?

[TheThiefMaster]

The question was: "How many other fast-tracked ISO standards have no conforming implementations?"
C++ isn't an answer because it wasn't fast-tracked.

I shouldn't have had to explain that...

Re:huh?

[weicco]

How many other fast-tracked or not-fast-tracked ISO standards have no conforming implementations?

Re:What kind of BS is that? "Strict Standard?"

[Erris]

According to TFA, Office 2007 OOXML is very conformant to ISO OOXML Transitional. But its not very comformant to ISO OOXML Strict.

You must have read a different article. The one I read was quoted in the summary,

Office 2007 failed miserably. If you go by the strict OOXML schema, you get a 17 MiB file containing approximately 122,000 errors, and 'somewhat less' with the transitional OOXML schema.

If you consider somewhat less of a miserable failure to be "very conformant" you might think OOXML is a worthy standard. The rest of the world thinks it's train wreck.

Re:What kind of BS is that? "Strict Standard?"

[Allador]

Your quote was from the GrokLaw summary, which used some creative editing of the original blog posting to create drama and brouhaha. It's important to go to the actual article that GrokLaw was quoting and get the information from the source.

Based on the actual root article, the results from the transitional version was nearly perfect, with 84 instances of the same (very minor) class of error.

From TFA:

The TRANSITIONAL conformance model is quite a bit closer to the original Ecma 376. Countries at the BRM (rather more than Ecma, as it happened) were very keen to keep compatibilty with Ecma 376 and to preserve XML structures at which legacy Office features could be targetted. The expectation is therefore that an MS Office 2007 document should be pretty close to valid according to the TRANSITIONAL schema.

Sure enough (again) the result is as expected: relatively few messages (84) are emitted and they are all of the same type complaining e.g. of the element:

<m:degHide m:val="on"/>

since the allowed attribute values for val are now "true", "false", etc. this was one of the many tidying-up exercices performed at the BRM. This is a simple (and very common in this sort of thing) error, and not too surprising or worrisome. It's basically a very minor errata.

This is actually quite impressive, given that the transitional version is not the same as what MS originally proposed, and so there was also little expectation that a document format created in the past would be conformant. It looks like the groups went to some effort to make sure that the transitional version was nearly 100% compatible with what MS Office 2007 actually emits.

And it shouldnt be surprising to anyone that Office 2007 doesnt conform to the strict version. The strict version was semi-major surgery on what MS proposed. And it was developed long after Office 2007 was released.

More from TFA:

Validating against the STRICT model

The STRICT conformance model is quite a bit different from Ecma 376, essentially because most of that format's most notorious features (non ISO dates, compatibility settings like autospacewotnot, VML, etc.) have been removed. Thus the expectation is that existing Office 2007 documents might be some distance away from being valid according to the strict schemas.

Sure enough, jing emitted 17MB (around 122,000) of invalidity messages when validating in this scenario. Most of them seem to involve unrecognised attributes or attribute values: I would expect a document which exercised a wider range of features to generate a more diverse set of error message. Again, to restate. The strict version of ISO OOXML (what causes all the errors in validation) is NOT based on the current version of MS Office 2007. Therefore there is no reason to expect that Office 2007 docs would be fully compliant. The strict version did not exist when Office 2007 was created, therefore it was not possible for them to be conformant to it.

To do so would have required them to predict into the future the path that ISO would take.

Now the interesting question will be whether MS aligns with the strict ISO OOXML in a future Office 2007 Service Pack, or even if they clean up that one minor issue found here (on/off vs. true/false in attributes).

The strict version breaks alot of backwards compatibility with legacy documents that were created in much older versions of office and forward converted. Given that, I'll be interested to see what MS does with this over the next year or two as their releases catch up to the ISO standards.

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Re:What kind of BS is that? "Strict Standard?"

[KGIII]

I admit that this is potentially off-topic. I'll take the negative karma. I am amazed and grateful for your words. Amazed because you weren't automatically marked down and grateful because you took the words out of my mouth. In a prior conversation about this I mentioned how even if Microsoft had done it properly the first time there would still have been complaints. The reality is that they *may* be doing just fine with this. They may be... Right now we're all just looking on and guessing.

Re:What kind of BS is that? "Strict Standard?"

[suckmysav]

Yeah,

But I thought the whole point of a fast track was to pass standards that are already in widespread use?

Clearly this is not the case with OOXML yet it was fast tracked anyway.

Re:What kind of BS is that? "Strict Standard?"

[Allador]

You'll get no argument from me on the Fast Track issue. It shouldnt have been done that way.

MicroCrap.....

[IHC Navistar]

I can already hear it.....

Steve Ballmer: "Office 2007 is a work in progress....."

Given that IS29500...

[Osrin]

... didn't exist when the document used for the test was saved, this should not really be much of a surprise.

http://osrin.net/2008/04/22/office-2007-is29500-conformance/

Re:

[clint999]

What about Sweden,Denmark and Finland then? No oil there, just industry and forest (well, not so much forest in Denmark). Yes, techically only Sweden is a Scandinavian country along with Norway, but the nordic countries are often lumped together.Still. If

Re:Does anyone know if Open Office is compliant wi

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:What kind of BS is that? "Strict Standard?"

[man_of_mr_e]

That's the purpose, but remember it whas all those National Bodies that demanded changes be made to the standard before it could be ratified. As such, it was ISO itself that mandated that it be different.

Hard drive comment

[remmelt]

> A "500 GB" hard drive still means 500,000,000,000 bytes.

Yes, but that's not because of any standards or morals or beliefs. That's because a 500,000,000,000 bytes drive is cheaper than a 500G(i)B drive and can still legally be named 500 GB.

Shady business practices aren't a good argument.

Other than that, carry on.

sensationalist

[abigsmurf]

"How many other fast-tracked ISO standards have no conforming implementations?"

ISO changed the standard as part of the process. Of course Office 2007 doesn't meet it. Microsoft have said there's a patch coming that reflects the changes ISO made.

This is pure sensationalism

Groklaw article is misleading

[b.honeydew]

From the original blog post http://www.griffinbrown.co.uk/blog/PermaLink,guid,3e2202cd-59a3-4356-8f30-b8eb79735e1a.aspx:

The TRANSITIONAL conformance model is quite a bit closer to the original Ecma 376. Countries at the BRM (rather more than Ecma, as it happened) were very keen to keep compatibilty with Ecma 376 and to preserve XML structures at which legacy Office features could be targetted. The expectation is therefore that an MS Office 2007 document should be pretty close to valid according to the TRANSITIONAL schema. Sure enough (again) the result is as expected: relatively few messages (84) are emitted and they are all of the same type complaining e.g. of the element: since the allowed attribute values for val are now "true", "false", etc. -- this was one of the many tidying-up exercices performed at the BRM.

Groklaw seems to have sexed up the results of the test to prove their case IMO.

What are you testing????

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you testing? The just now approved IS 29500 does not have any implementation yet. You are much too early. The current implementations of OOXML follow ECMA-376 Edition 1, which is slightly different, as that is the old Ecma Standard. Only the IS 29500 and ECMA-376 Edition 2 will be technically the same. But none of them are published yet, let alone implemented. That takes still some time. So any current test does not make sense to me.

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And now it's time for the Microsoft Happy Fun Hour

[Jesus_666]

Hey, children! Let's sing a happy little song!

If your standard is full of shit, clap your hands.
If your standard is full of shit, clap your hands.
If your standard is full of shit and you really want to show it,
If your standard is full of shit clap your hands.

If you can't implement the damn thing, clap your hands.
If you can't implement the damn thing, clap your hands.
If you can't implement the damn thing and the mere thought sends you crying,
If you can't implement the damn thing, clap your hands.

If the developers are dying, clap your hands.
If the developers are dying, clap your hands.
If the developers are dying 'cause Steve Ballmer's chairs are flying
If the developers are dying, clap your hands.

That was fun, kids! And next up is an exciting new episode of Billy Rich! Today, Billy buys Norway!

A whole lot of nothing.

[inTheLoo]

The original opinion you are quoting boils down to this,

Making them conform to the TRANSITIONAL will require less of the same sort of surgery (since they're quite close to conformant as-is)

and that's a load of apologist nonsense. It's not a working standard even in the "transitional" sense and does not deserve ISO approval.

If M$ cared about playing nice, they would have devoted their effort to ODF translators for their legacy binary formats and continued along with those formats. Microsoft's "separate purpose" of OOXML is better suited by them continuing along legacy lines. The purpose of anywhere implementable formatting is best done with ODF. M$ moved along with OOXML because the rest of the world figured out their binary formats. They don't want to use ODF for the same reason their browsers consistently fail simple W3C format tests - they don't want to play nice, they want to continue their obscene late 80's format game.

Re:A whole lot of nothing.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is weird, you sound exactly like Erris.

Re:A whole lot of nothing.

[Allador]

... and that's a load of apologist nonsense. It's not a working standard even in the "transitional" sense and does not deserve ISO approval. I'm not sure what you're reading into that sentence you quoted. It's a fairly simple factual statement. I'm not sure what about it is 'apologist nonsense'. Since the transitional version of the ISO OOXML is almost exactly the same as what Office 2007 emits, it will be very easy to get Office inline. Thats a pretty straightforward concept.

If M$ cared about playing nice, they would have devoted their effort to ODF translators for their legacy binary formats and continued along with those formats. Microsoft's "separate purpose" of OOXML is better suited by them continuing along legacy lines. The purpose of anywhere implementable formatting is best done with ODF. I'm not sure what you mean by 'playing nice', but the idea that they should have just moved immediately to ODF is nonsense. The two formats are not isomorphic. Specifically the MS formats have a ton more features that just dont exist in ODF, and many that are implemented in completely different ways (equations, vector graphics, etc). And in any case, no one uses ODF. If you were to send ODF documents to people nowadays, the vast vast majority wouldnt be able to open them or have a clue what they were.

It would make no sense whatsoever for a business to dumb down their products to fit into ODF. Maybe one with a brand new Office suite, that doesnt have 10-15 years of features (and quirks and bugs) floating around. And it wouldnt serve their customers, except possibly in the very long run, and even that is a gamble.

M$ moved along with OOXML because the rest of the world figured out their binary formats. They don't want to use ODF for the same reason their browsers consistently fail simple W3C format tests - Thats a very questionable statement about why they moved off binary formats. I'm sure both their customers and their internal developers have been clamoring for years to do so, and they finally did.

They dont want to use ODF because it makes zero business sense for them to do so. It doesnt have to be made any more complicated than that.

they don't want to play nice, they want to continue their obscene late 80's format game. Their actions speak a different story.

OOXML is in the hands of ISO, and has already evolved to be different from what MS Office 2007 emits.

Both the OOXML and the binary versions have publicly available documentation now.

Yes, they're complicated. But despite what the M$-is-teh-devil crowd will tell you, its because they are complicated. They are basically a snapshot of the internal memory representation inside the office apps. They have evolved over 10-15 years to what they are now. There is going to naturally be alot of cruft and bloat. This should not have come as a surprise to anyone.

Both from a business and engineering standpoint, it would have been a monumentally huge task to try to convert Office to emit ODF natively. And it would have had very little return on the investment.

Re:Really

[Anonymous Coward]

Really (Score:1) by willeyhill (1277478) So now you're parodying the username of a guy whose username is a parody of your real name.

Twitter, you're enough to make any sane person completely loopy.

Re:New Goat Please.

[dedazo]

twitter, you are reaching new heights of bullshit and dishonesty. This entire thread is basically you agreeing with yourself. And two new sockpuppets? Wow. Just wow.

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Re:Really

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging from your troll moderation, he sure did.

Re:New Goat Please.

[fm6]

Dude, somebody wasted a mod point downmodding a post that started at -1. That should give you some idea of how unpopular you are.

Wrong.

[SEMW]

Facts? Try this fact: this is not an external standard that Microsoft is supposed to bring their software into line with, this standard was presented by Microsoft as accurately describing what their software actually did. That's the whole reason it was "fast tracked", because it was supposed to be a description of a conforming implementation. Wrong. OOXML Strict is an external standard that Microsoft is supposed to bring their software into line with. The standard that's based on what Office 2007 actually does is OOXML Transitional, under which Office 2007 gave one error, repeated 84 times (the "somewhat less" in the summary is typical Slashdot summary-flamebait).